The year 2011 marked the 60 th anniversary of the United Nations Refugee Convention. It is thus an appropriate time to review the situation of refugees in one of the few signatory countries that accepts UNHCR approved refugees, Australia. Australia takes around 14,000 refugees annually, from countries in the African, Middle Eastern and Asian regions. The Australian government funds a range of services to assist the settlement process, and these are recognized as among the best in the world. While these services provide assistance in the areas of employment, education and training, housing, language, health, social support, and cultural orientation, there is room for improvement to ensure social inclusion. This paper provides an overview of research undertaken with this population over the last fifteen years investigating some of the key barriers to social inclusion. It outlines a number of matters in need of policy improvement, and areas for further research.
Australia offers some of the best government-funded settlement services in the world to refugees who come through its official resettlement programme. These services cater to their material, medical and, to some extent, their social needs. However, services cannot provide a sense of belonging to people uprooted from their homelands and transplanted to a culturally and geographically distant place. Or can they? This article explores the facets of belonging identified inductively from a corpus of data from qualitative interviews with 77 refugees living in Western Australia. Thematically, these map clearly onto civic and ethno conceptualizations of the nation-state and belonging within it. While refugees assert their civic belonging in terms of access to services and rights available to refugees and to Australians more broadly, their sense of ethno belonging is much more ambivalent, due to experiences with the mainstream population. Implications in regard to the concept of the nation-state, and for processes of integration and social inclusion, are considered.
The need for reliable access to hearing health care services is growing globally, particularly in developing countries and in remotely located, underserved regions in many parts of the developed world. Individuals with hearing loss in these areas are at a significant disadvantage due to the scarcity of local hearing health care professionals and the high cost of hearing aids. Current approaches to making hearing rehabilitation services more readily available to underserved populations include teleaudiology and the provision of amplification devices outside of the traditional provider-client relationship. Both strategies require access to such resources as dedicated equipment and/or specially trained staff. Another possible strategy is a self-fitting hearing aid, a personal amplification device that is equipped with an onboard tone generator to enable user-controlled, automated, in situ audiometry; an onboard prescription to determine the initial hearing aid settings; and a trainable algorithm to enable user-controlled fine-tuning. The device is thus assembled, fitted, and managed by the user without the need for audiological or computer support. This article details the self-fitting concept and its potential application in both developing and developed countries. Potential advantages and disadvantages of such a device are discussed, and considerations for further investigations into the concept are presented. Overall, the concept is considered technologically viable with the main challenges anticipated to be development of clear, simple user instructions and a delivery model that ensures reliable supplies of instant-fit ear tips and batteries.
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