The Indigenous Offender Health Capacity Building Group Community Report (2017)
In 2009, a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory received a NHMRC capacity building grant for the project ‘From Broome to Berrima: Building capacity Australia-wide in Indigenous offender health research’.
This project saw a network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics (Chief Investigators) and mentors work with and support aspiring and emerging researchers (Team Investigators), to build their individual research capacity and, more broadly, research and knowledge in the Indigenous offender health field. Together, investigators, mentors, project members, and collaborators came to make up the Indigenous Offender Health Research Capacity Building Group (IOHR-CBG).
Many interesting and diverse research projects developed from IOHR-CBG members, covering areas critical to the health and wellbeing of people who come into contact with the criminal justice system. Many projects have been completed and others ongoing. The breadth of methodologies has been an asset to the group, with methods ranging from data-linkage to community driven action research. An important vehicle for researcher capacity building has been postgraduate study. Most team investigators were (or are) enrolled in higher degree research.