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Invest the time to build trust among marginalized research participants

Gaining access to Indigenous communities and offering health care in a decolonizing way can take years of respectful collaboration.
  1. Virginia Gewin

    1. Virginia Gewin is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

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Historically in Australia, research has been a dirty word among First Nations communities, some of the most ‘researched on’ people in the country. They got no ownership of the data obtained from their participation, no recognition of their sovereignty and no help in building their own research capacity. But there’s been a national push to try to ensure that research is driven, and co-designed, by Indigenous Australians themselves. Increasingly, national funders, including the National Health and Medical Research Council, require grant applicants to provide evidence of Indigenous partnerships, including Indigenous leadership.

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Nature 612, 177-178 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04139-9

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 13 December 2022: The interview with Pamela Laird contained several inaccuracies. Laird is a clinician at Perth Children’s Hospital, not at the University of Western Australia; wet cough is a symptom, not an infection; and the team would have done CT scans only for diagnosis, not for testing treatments.

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