Hands on Health Australia is reaching out to all disadvantaged Australians to ask them: “R U OK?”

MEDIA RELEASE - Thursday 10 September 2020

REACHING OUT TO ASK: R U OK?

Hands on Health Australia (HoHA) is reaching out to all disadvantaged Australians today to ask them: “R U OK?”

Today (Thursday 10 September) is the national day of action for the R U OK campaign to remind Australians to ask someone who is struggling with life’s ups and downs: “Are you OK?”

HoHA CEO Franca Smarrelli said disadvantaged Australians face ups and downs every day because of the struggles they face.

The recent Poverty in Australia 2020 report ACOSS and UNSW (Sydney) found that 3.24 million people - one in eight adults and one in six children - (13.6% of the population) live below the poverty line. There were also 774,000 children under the age of 15 (17.7% of all children in Australia) living below the poverty line.

“We are at the coal face of these issue with our services and R U OK is one of the key questions we ask every patient when they are seeking help,” said. Ms Smarrelli.

HoHA provides mental and physical health services, along with financial and legal counselling to more than 80,000 disadvantaged Australians annually, many of whom are Aboriginal, through its clinics in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.

HOHA Patron and retired psychologist Dr Sam Ginsberg, OAM the R U OK question was most important this year because of the significant additional stresses many people were facing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This pandemic is awakening everyone to the importance of mental health and the need to have accessible Community based facilities that can meet what are now emergency situations,” he said.

“The legacy of Covid-19 will be mental scars on people that will affect their lives for many years to come.”

According to the Poverty in Australia report, Australia had a worse poverty rate than most other wealthy countries. It is worse than in New Zealand, Germany and Ireland, according to the latest figures from the OECD.

For further information please contact:

Franca Smarrelli, Tel 0403 529 737 or franca@hoha.org.au

ABOUT HANDS ON HEALTH AUSTRALIA (HoHA):

Patrons: Dr. Patch Adams MD; Mrs Evonne Goolagong-Cawley AO, MBE; Ian Goolagong, Miss Moira Kelly AO; Dr. Samuel H Ginsberg OAM; Most Rev. Bishop David Cremin D.D; Stephen Blunden.

HoHA is a community-based charity that provides physical and mental health and wellbeing services to disadvantaged and marginalised people and communities. It was founded by Dr. Dein Vindigni whilst studying with Community Aid Abroad in India in 1987 where he met international humanitarian Moira Kelly, of Melbourne, who had spent time with Mother Teresa in Calcutta working with the ‘poorest of the poor’. Now a Senior Lecturer at RMIT, Dr Vindigni gained support for his desire to help the needy through the late Father Ernie Smith, a parish priest at Sacred Heart in St Kilda and set up the first official HoHA clinic in a small room in the Mission’s headquarters offering chiropractic treatment to those who visited the Mission. From these beginnings HoHA expanded its services in physical health, wellbeing and mental health community support services to three states and internationally.