Outcome measurement with indigenous consumers

The need to monitor outcomes is nowhere more pressing than in those areas where systems appear to be least effective. For Indigenous peoples of Australia there has been delayed recognition of the dire mental health consequences of many aspects of colonization and development (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997, Calma, 2007). High suicide rates and community concern have begun to attract national attention and intervention after decades of procrastination (Zubrick et al., 1995, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005, Brown and Brown, 2007). �While some have argued that it is necessary to develop Indigenous-specific tools to assess status and outcomes with sufficient validity, others recognize the potential loss to Indigenous consumers if they are not included in the national datasets. However, comparability in the use of mainstream measures with Indigenous consumers is highly under-researched� (Haswell-Elkins et al., 2007). The lack of research and development can be attributed to complexity as well as to political will. In terms of complexity, many of the challenges are similar to those of the non-Indigenous setting. There is tension in outcome measurement (OM) between the needs and perspectives of the different stakeholders who collect and use this information. The multi-dimensional framework for health performance indicators in Australia recognizes the need to measure outcomes at population and service level as well as at the level of the individual consumer. � Cambridge University Press 2010.