Waterloo Health Forum 2.0 - Building a Healthy Resilient Community 8.30am to 2.00pm Friday 4th May

Sydney Local Health District (SLHD)

About a year ago REDWatch, Counterpoint Community Services and Inner Sydney Voice met with the head of SLHD, Dr Teresa Anderson. We asked that SLHD become more actively involved in addressing the human services issues in Waterloo. We wanted Health to address how people navigate the health system, how the health system interacts with other human services, and how population level health issues could be best addressed as part of the redevelopment.

One of the first outcomes of that meeting was a Waterloo Health Forum in September 2017. You can see some of the issues coming out of that forum in the Report of the Building a Healthy and Resilient Waterloo Now and Into the Future 27th, 28th September 2017. These findings have fed into the planning around the Waterloo human services plan that FACS is developing.

The SLHD forum on 4 May at 8.30am is the second Waterloo Health Forum focusing on Building a Healthy Resilient Community. This forum is open to the local community, NGOs, health workers and government people. It is an ideal opportunity to get an overview of what is happening in the area and to talk about how Health can better respond to local issues in Waterloo. If you would like to go please RSVP to SLHD-Planning@health.nsw.gov.au by 27th April, 2018 (This Friday).

The second outcome from our approach to SLHD was for SLHD to employ a Healthy Living Link Worker for Waterloo. Those who attended the last REDWatch meeting heard Kristian Reyes talk about his role – he will talk also at the 4thy May Waterloo Health Forum. We asked for this role in response to long standing requests from Waterloo NAB and others for a Health “go to person” who could help address the complex health issues that people cannot seem to get addressed currently by the Health system. Kristian has also been attending the FACS LAHC human services meetings. He currently operates from The Factory on Wednesday (Thursday for this week after ANZAC Day). You can contact Kristian by email at Kristian.Reyes@health.nsw.gov.au.

The third outcome we asked of SLHD, was to bring a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) lens to the Waterloo redevelopment. SLHD had been doing a HIA on Green Square. This study should be released in the near future and it will be helpful in looking at a range of health impacts associated with a high density inner city redevelopment. Many of the issues raised will be relevant to Waterloo, but what will be missing is the impact of redevelopment on a community with high and complex needs. We hence asked SLHD to do a Health Impact Assessment for Waterloo. Health were unable to get a HIA into the initial study requirements for the Waterloo redevelopment, but they did get an undertaking that the health elements of the other studies would be pulled together so a gaps’ analysis could be done. We wait to see if this materialises from the studies when the summaries are released. SLHD however remains committed to bringing an equity focused HIA lens to the Waterloo redevelopment and we will find out more about this at the 4 May Health Forum. David Lilly, who worked for LAHC during the Waterloo master planning in 2011, was recently employed to work part time on Waterloo HIA issues for SLHD.