THE AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS DOCTORS’ ASSOCIATION: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FIRST 25 YEARS

Twenty-five years ago, a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander medical graduates and students gathered in a small conference room on Worimi Country at Salamander Bay in the New South Wales (NSW) Hunter Region to workshop a vision for the future – a vision of mutual support to grow their numbers, and by doing so, improve the dire health of their people.

Tiny in size but big on fierce determination, the group’s discussions over four days led directly to the formation of what became the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association (AIDA). There was no funding, no office and no staff, just a dream and the collective will to carve out for themselves a unique place in Australia’s medical landscape.

Little could they have predicted that over the span of a single generation, the organisation they created would transform itself from a mutual support network into a key player helping to drive fundamental change across the nation’s entire health system.

Today AIDA sits on the committees and in the boardrooms of the most powerful peak health and medical bodies in the land. It has the ears of Prime Ministers, health ministers, health departments and specialist medical colleges alike, and has partnered with others to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health is now a core component of every medical student’s education.

Beyond the medical arena, AIDA is firmly embedded in the much broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health ecosystem, working in solidarity with its sister organisations to improve the health and wellbeing of all our people no matter where they live in this vast and ancient land that we have called home for more than 60,000 years.

This history charts how all this came to be, starting from AIDA’s tentative beginnings to its emergence as a critical and powerful voice shaping the future of health care and of health service provision for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.