A child injury prevention program delivered with an Aboriginal community playgroup is demonstrating why co-design is critical in Indigenous health research.
A child injury prevention program co-designed and delivered by Aboriginal educators in Walgett, in north-western NSW, is helping strengthen safety awareness among parents and carers while highlighting why co-design is vital for culturally safe health programs.
The Child Injury Prevention Partnership (CHIPP) was delivered through a long-running Aboriginal community playgroup, with the aim of reducing unintentional injuries among Indigenous children, who are overrepresented in serious injury statistics.
The program focused on three key areas; water safety (Gali), road safety (Yurrun) and safety around the home (Goondi), using Gamillaraay language to embed cultural knowledge throughout its activities. It was co-designed by Aboriginal educators, families and researchers from UNSW Sydney, and the findings and an evaluation of the program were published in Injury Prevention.
The co-design approach was key to creating an impactful, practical program, and for Indigenous research more broadly, said researcher Amy Townsend, from UNSW’s School of Population Health and the Walgett Aboriginal Medical Service (WAMS).
"Co-design is essential in Indigenous research because it ensures that solutions are grounded in community knowledge, priorities and lived realities,” she said.
“Meaningful collaboration with community-led organisations like WAMS, whose mission is to support the holistic wellbeing of Aboriginal people, ensures that child injury prevention efforts are not only culturally safe, but genuinely effective and sustainable.”
The program was delivered in 2021 by the WAMS’ playgroup, Goonimoo Mobile Children’s Services, which has been operating in the area since the mid-1980s.
Sessions ran three times per week during school term and included safety yarns, take-home information resources and practical activities such as mums and bubs swimming lessons and a home safety open day with Kidsafe NSW. Families were also provided with safety tools such as bike helmets and were offered a professional child restraint car seat fitting.
Goonimoo staff also gained qualifications in swim instruction and child restraint fitting throughout the program, strengthening local capacity to deliver ongoing safety education.
“The program benefitted from established relationships, cultural safety, and deep local knowledge. WAMS’ flexibility and resilience particularly through disruptions like COVID-19, floods, and drought highlighted the importance of investing in local capacity to deliver meaningful, community-led child injury prevention," said Townsend.
Six primary carers, five secondary carers and nine children regularly took part in the program, and 10 additional families joined on a casual basis. Children were aged 0–3 years, and half of the primary carers identified as Aboriginal.
An additional 30 families took part in some of the program, when it moved to providing remote support, through activity packs and phone calls, during the pandemic and flooding events. Social media was also used to share safety messages with the broader Walgett community.
While the evaluation did not measure changes in injury rates, qualitative feedback suggests the program improved safety awareness and led to tangible changes in homes and services.
Families reported increased confidence in teaching safety, and described changes such as supervising children more closely and ensuring helmets and car seats were used correctly.
"The CHIPP program has made a meaningful impact on unintentional child injury in Walgett by strengthening families’ knowledge, skills, and confidence to prevent and manage injury in their homes and communities,” Townsend said.
“The message that ‘child safety is everybody’s business’ resonated across individual, family, organisational and community levels.”
The program also led to practical changes like WAMS’ child car seat policy and Goonimoo’s safe arrival procedures showing how local capacity building can translate into lasting, systemic improvements in child safety, she said.
The evaluation of the program used a mixed-methods approach informed by Indigenous research methodologies, including yarning circles, staff reflections and service use data. Researchers focused on feasibility, cultural acceptability and short-term impacts rather than long-term behavioural change.
Participants and community stakeholders described the co-design process as respectful and culturally safe, noting that it allowed the program to reflect local priorities and embed Aboriginal knowledge in practical ways.
Researchers say the next step is to explore how programs like CHIPP can be scaled and adapted for other Aboriginal communities, including in urban settings, while maintaining cultural safety and community leadership. They hope future evaluations will measure long-term outcomes, including reductions in injury rates.