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Table 3 Family support

From: The journey of aftercare for Australia’s First Nations families whose child had sustained a burn injury: a qualitative study

Lack of local service providers disrupts family routines

“It would have been easier if maybe somebody could have organised someone to come here to change his bandages, instead of me taking all the kids down to the hospital all the time. They do it after you have a baby, they come out and check on you in your house, so I’m not sure why something wasn’t organised for them to come and change the bandages here, instead of making appointments every second day to come down [to the city hospital] with three or four other kids in tow. So yeah, it was pretty annoying. There are no local people to do the dressing here.”

“We’re all very tired. And my second eldest has … and possible autism. So, it’s hard on him as well, going to other people’s houses. The kids have had to miss a bit of school. I miss things that they do at school, as well as taking them to school. So, Maisona, the second oldest, missed out on the pet parade and I organised for a friend to take him, Ellie the dog, and she (Ellie) didn’t feel like it. So, Maisona had no pet for the pet parade, because I was in Sydney with Lucaa. They get split up sometimes having to stay at different people’s places for days.”

Needed support for single parent families

“Mine would be the lack of support for single parents. When you have no family where you live and they want to fly you out, but you can’t get a flight out because you have another child and they won’t take extra children on the flight and then you have to drive with a kid that has an injury of a burn, you’ve got to drive nine hours to get there by a certain time and also the hospital that don’t cater for single parents to have to actually have the kids stay there because there might not be another option.”

The need for information for ongoing emotional support

“An information pack would be good to step you through all the emotions you go through and probably even the emotions that you’re going to feel after it happens and who to go to for help. You run through it constantly for days. You can’t sleep because you just – it’s always running in your head – up until you know that they’re going to be ok. Once I knew that it was all okay and that we’d finished the process, then it was – it sort of subsided, it went away, but in those times, you just constantly were thinking what could you have done, and you’d have dreams about what would have happened if you didn’t have the ice, the water, you went through all those emotions of what would have happened if we didn’t have that.”

  1. aNot the child’s real name