Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Program

Solid Safe Connections (SSC), AHCWA’s Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus (SHBBV) program, provides ongoing SHBBV support to member services and other organisations that work with Aboriginal people through capacity building and health promotion activities. The SSC team maintains regular contact with staff from Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS) in order to identify and respond to support needs and provide ongoing culturally appropriate SHBBV information and resources.

Solid Safe Connections delivers professional development including face-to-face training called The Birds and The BBVs, and 30-minute webinars called The Bites. These education and training activities are delivered in partnership with key stakeholders. They aim to increase the knowledge, skills, and confidence of health service staff to yarn with clients and community about sexual health and wellbeing and the importance of testing for STIs and BBVs.

The program also provides support to member services with Point of Care Testing, exploring barriers and ways to increase testing numbers whilst incorporating continuous quality improvement and best practice principles across the program.

The AHCWA Sexual Health team also supports WA ACCHS and other organisations that work with young Aboriginal people to deliver SHBBV training and education through our Real Talk, No Shame program. This is a ‘train-the-trainer’ style program that aims to increase the knowledge, skills and confidence of participants to yarn with young people about sexual health and wellbeing topics.

Solid Safe Connections also used social media as a health promotion initiative to deliver strengths-based sexual health promotion. Our content is created and informed by Aboriginal youth for Aboriginal youth to deliver informative, educational, and entertaining content.