“My work? Well, I live it and breathe it”: The seamless connect between the professional and personal/community self in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector

Abstract

Background: Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health professionals often juggle the challenges of working and living in the same community in ways that are positive for both themselves and their clients. This study specifically examines the strategies Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health professionals have developed to enable them to feel empowered by the sense of being always visible or perceived as being always available. Findings provide examples of how participants (Team Members) established a seamless working self, including how they often held different perspectives to many work colleagues, how Team Members were always visible to community and how Team Members were comfortable to be seen as working when not at work. Methods: This qualitative study engages an Indigenous research methodology and uses an Indigenous method, PhotoYarning, to explore lived experiences of a group (n = 15) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers as they worked in the Australian health sector. Results: The analysis presented here comes from data generated through PhotoYarning sessions. Team Members in this study all work in health care settings in the communities in which they also live, they manage an extremely complex network of interactions and relationships in their daily working lives. They occupy an ambivalent, and sometimes ambiguous, position as representing both their health profession and their community. This article explores examples of what working with seamlessness involved, with findings citing four main themes: (1) Being fellow members of their cultural community, (2) the feeling of always being visible to community as a health worker, (3) the feeling of always being available as a health worker to community even when not at work and (4) the need to set an example. Conclusions: While creating the seamlessness of working and living in the same community was not easy, Team Members considered it an important feature of the work they did and vital if they were to be able to provide quality health service to their community. However, they reported that the seamless working self was at odds with the way many of their non-Indigenous Australian colleagues worked and it was not well understood.