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About HOH - Hands on Health  |
| Patrons:
| Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce AC
Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia
His Eminence Edward Cardinal Cassidy
Mrs Evonne Goolagong Cawley AO MBE
Dr Peter Hollingworth AC OBE
Miss Moira Kelly AO
Dr Patch Adams, M.D
Dr Sam Ginsberg OAM,Ded MAP.S.
Mr Steve Blunden
| Hands on Health Australia (abbreviated to HOHA) is an organisation based in the Asia-Pacific region, which has its national administrative base in Melbourne. This administrative base, which we also refer to as “the National Body” plays various roles in the running of Hands on Health projects.
| Directors of the National body of HOHA
| Whilst on a study tour with Community Aid Abroad in 1987, Dein met Moira Kelly at one of the world's most crowded rail stations, in Calcutta. Moira and Mother Teresa`s Missionaries of Charity had gathered many of Calcutta`s orphaned children and cared for them in a clinic established on-site at the station. It was from this experience that Dein was inspired to start a small voluntary clinic caring for the needy in Melbourne by taking the service to the places that the people called home. He began offering chiropractic treatment as well as hospitality to those who visited the Sacred Heart Mission in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, and was soon joined by more professional volunteers. Other HOHA clinics and training programs were subsequently established throughout Australia and overseas.
| | President
| Dr Greg Taylor BSc Grad Dip Chiro
| Greg is a chiropractor practising in Sydney and works as a HOHA volunteer chiropractor in three of Sydneys four HOHA clinics. He has also worked as a HOHA volunteer in various Aboriginal communities in NSW and plans to extend his HOHA work overseas in the Philippines and Thailand. Greg is currently President of HOHA and is studying for a Masters in Chiropractic Paediatrics. Greg is married with four young children and is dedicated to finding that fine balance between work and helping to raise a family.
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| | Secretary
| Dr Dein Vindigni OAM, B.App.Sc.(Chiro.), B.A.(Soc Sc), Master Med Sc, PhD.
| Dein Vindigni, chiropractor and founder of HOHA, has been actively involved since its inception in 1987.
In 2005, Dein, at the suggestion of an Indigenous Elder, completed a PhD to document the pain and disability endured by Indigenous Australians in a large, rural community. Based on the findings of this study and the work of chiropractor, Dr Felicity Redpath, in the Philippines, he collaborated with Aboriginal Health Workers and Elders to develop, implement and evaluate a training program to help indigenous communities manage the high prevalence of painful and disabling musculoskeletal conditions in their communities. This innovative, community-based and owned initiative has provided a model for training health workers in other communities where services such as chiropractic are inaccessible, mostly because of financial, geographical and cultural barriers.
Dein works in this area of interest as a part-time researcher at RMIT University, Australia. Through community-based consultation and evaluation methods such as Participatory Action Research, the health programs seeded by HOHA continue to be sensitive and responsive to the communities that they serve.
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| | Vice President
| Dr Peter Derig, DC, DO, ND
| Peter graduated in Podiatry in 1964 then Osteopathy, Naturopathy and Chiropractic in 1966. Acupuncture followed in 1970 and he was a member of the team that performed the first birth by acupuncture in Australia in 1972 in Sydney’s Mona Vale Hospital. After completing studies in Kinesiology he opened the NSW College of Osteopathy and Naturopathy in Sydney in 1967, which later changed to"Health Schools Australia", one of the largest colleges of Natural Medicine of which he was principal for 40 years.
Currently he is the Director of Total Wellness & Longevity Centre on Hope Island (Queensland’s Gold Coast) and is the first to practise Painless Chiropractic (Koren Specific Technique, KST) in Australia. In 2000 he opened the Gold Coast branch of Hands-On-Health Australia (Matthew Talbot Centre), with a support team of chiropractors and other volunteers, which continues to serve the local community.
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| | Treasurer
| Mr Michael Howard, FFA FIAA MBA FAICD
| Michael is a consultant involved with a diversity of assignments encompassing a wide range of issues and disciplines. He is the Appointed Actuary for two health funds and has extensive experience in the financial services industry as an actuary, senior manager, executive and director. Among other involvements, he is Deputy Chair of Friends of Mary of The Cross, the fund raising arm of a charity providing counseling and other services to addicts and their families.
He is married with three children and six grand children. He is researching various aspects of performance measurement, strategic management and governance in smaller charities as part of a professional doctorate.
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|  | | | Ms Helen Formentin - Nurse, Pastoral Counsellor
| Helen has worked as a registered nurse in acute clinical nursing departments in Western Australia at Royal Perth and Fremantle hospitals for 37 years before recently retiring. She has a passionate interest in spiritual education for adults, for which she has been gaining qualifications since 1975. She has spent many years in Pastoral Ministry: working in hospital chaplaincy, facilitating secular and parish groups in spiritual direction, general faith education, directing weekend retreats, and has sung in a Basilica liturgical choir for forty years. She is a qualified second level Reiki therapist and a reflexologist, and, as a member of HOH since 1999, has contributed these skills to clinics at Fremantle and Northbridge, and the local Cottage Hospice. She is responsible for editing the HOHA newsletter and overseeing the development of HOHA policies and practices to help existing programs and to assist in establishing new HOH clinics. Other energies are spent enjoying her four children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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| | John Woulfe - Podiatrist
| John’s clinical involvement began at the Sacred Heart Mission in St Kilda, Victoria, as a volunteer podiatrist, and is now in his nineteenth year of voluntary service. He has a long-term commitment to promoting sustainable health solutions for communities in need. He has developed a system of manufacturing very low cost orthotics to manage the pain and disability endured by low-income and marginalised communities throughout Australasia. He has an interest in developing foot-care, skills-training for health-workers in overseas squatter settlements and rural and remote Indigenous Australian communities and hopes to travel to these communities as part of this ongoing commitment to serving the poor.
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| | Professor Gay Edgecombe, PhD
| Gay currently holds the position of Professor and Clinical Chair in Community Child Health Nursing, a position linked closely to the state-wide Maternal and Child Health Nursing Service and the School Nursing Program of Victoria. Her research interests include health care evaluation, maternal and child health, school health and public health. Recent research projects have utilised the action research approach to ensure that the research process is responsive and inclusive of the community involved.
She obtained her nursing qualifications in Western Australia (general nursing, child health and PhD), Scotland (midwifery) and the United States (Master of Science in Community Nursing as a Kellogg Fellow 1984-1986 at the University of Colorado). For 10 years she worked as a generalist public health nurse in metropolitan, rural and remote regions of Western Australian in Aboriginal health public health programs, and then from 1981 as a Regional and state Assistant Director of public health nursing, displaying her life-long commitment to serving and empowering people living in poverty.
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| | Associate Professor Barbara Polus, B.App.Sc. (Chiropractic), M.Sc. (Physiology), Ph.D
| Barbara is Associate Professor of Chiropractic Neuroscience with the School Of Health Sciences at RMIT University, Bundoora Campus, Victoria, and is the recipient of scholarships and awards in the fields of community service and health. She has been responsible for a diverse range of academic responsibilities both internal and external to the University, including Chair of the Human Research Ethics sub-committee within the SET (science engineering and technology) portfolio at RMIT University.
She has published her research and scholarship endeavours in peer-reviewed journals, and magazines, and despite a huge workload, is always wholeheartedly willing to assist all who seek her help. In 1993, she established the RMIT chiropractic student clinic at the Sacred Heart Mission, St Kilda, which continues to provide treatment for people who are unable to access usual chiropractic services.
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| Administration
| | Mrs Nancy Lowe, Administrative Secretary
| As the administrative secretary, Nancy is the first point-of-contact for enquiries to HOHA, answering questions and assisting those interested in learning more about our work. She oversees the day-to-day tasks of keeping our many volunteers informed and involved by organizing meetings, A.G.M.s and conferences, as well as liaising closely with the HOHA Board and Executive and our many clinic coordinators. Nancy ensures that all legal and accounting paperwork is efficiently processed, and also coordinates the production of the HOHA newsletter which is distributed to all clinics, programs and members.
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| | Mr Bill Lowe, Book-keeping and Web-page Management
| Bill is Keeper of the Books and performs the data entry for HOHA`s accounts. He also manages and upgrades our web-site and assists in the production of both the newsletter and promotional DVDs.
Both Bill and Nancy have been actively involved in facilitating Church, youth and community activities throughout their lives. They bring much practical wisdom and assistance to the life and work of HOHA.
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| Each member of our Board has a strong commitment to social justice. They have given, and continue to give, many hours of professional expertise and service to ensure that our HOH clinics and educational programs are delivered with integrity to disadvantaged persons and their communities to provide them with sustainable health care, wellbeing and self empowerment. Our vision and hope is for our philosophy to spread throughout Australia and Asia, and be recognised by the World Health Organisation as a role model for community based organisations serving and empowering disadvantaged people providing free or low cost health services.
| The role of the National body is varied and includes:
| - Provision of administrative support to established clinics.
- Assisting clinics with funding by giving a small seeding loan when funds permit.
- Assisting students with expenses for travel to remote areas to work on HOH projects via the HOH traveling scholarship.
- Liaison with educational institutions, particularly those teaching chiropractic, massage, psychology and naturopathy to provide students with the opportunity to undertake practical work by treating those who would be otherwise unable to access these services. RMIT University has had a long history of Chiropractic interns working in Hands on Health Clinics and projects.
- Liaison with Lions, Rotary and other service groups who wish to become a part of the work by connecting them to a particular project.
- Establishing and maintaining clinical educational programmes. Currently HOH provides certificate and diploma level courses in myotherapy for indigenous students in Australia. Hands on Health also runs a course in Manila in massage therapy whose graduates may progress to undertake the local licensing examination. These people not only go on to serve their community , but also gain a career option which would have been otherwise unavailable to them.
- * Maintenance of this website and provision of quarterly teleconferences to encourage regular contact and knowledge sharing between clinics throughout Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. HOH also publishes a half yearly newsletter.
- HOH also offers ongoing guidance through an extensive network of honorary advisors and via the support of our administrator Nancy Lowe.
- Supporting communities in establishing their own HOH clinic.
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