Replanting the Birthing Trees Newsletter - October 2025
Welcome to the October 2025 Replanting the Birthing Trees (RBT) e-news!
We are pleased to share this newsletter update for three Medical Research Future Funded projects; Replanting the Birthing Trees, Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future and Relighting the Firesticks. These projects aim to improve culturally responsive trauma-aware and healing-informed maternity care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.
The Replanting the Birthing Trees (RBT) project is in the 3rd year of a four-year project, and a lot has been achieved in this time. Trauma-informed care training (online and face-to-face) and workshops have been conducted in seven hospitals across Victoria and Western Australia. Several health services have developed and undertaken extensive implementation plans to improve care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents, and we recognise and applaud this deep commitment to high quality culturally responsive, and trauma-informed care. The RBT resource hub including child protection tip sheets continue to be utilised across Australia. We are also pleased to be launching the RBT toolkit – Working Towards Safe and Sacred Care, which has been shared in draft form with over 50 maternity services through the Women’s Healthcare Australasia network. The Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency are developing an important training package to help maternity service workers understand the child protection system, and their important role in providing wrap around support and referring to community and other services to ensure all families are supported to stay together from the start. We are looking at data that has been collected and reflecting on key learnings, with several publications underway and submitted. We are also starting to collect post implementation data and are finally starting to receive linked data in Victoria.
The Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future team is collecting post implementation data in the final year of the project in Gippsland, Victoria. We are delighted that the community advisory group is continuing to guide health service improvements, and that we will be able to support further work to improve maternity care services for Aboriginal families through the Relighting the Firesticks project.
The Relighting the Firesticks team are working across four workstreams, including developing a trauma-aware and healing informed health promotion framework; further validation on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander complex trauma and strengths questionnaire; partnerships with three health services to support development and implementation of strategies to improve maternity care for Aboriginal families; and developing recommendations for core outcomes to measure the impact of these strategies.