MEDIA RELEASE 13 February 2026: Healing Requires Action — and a Workforce to Deliver It.

On the anniversary of the National Apology, Indigenous Allied Health Australia (IAHA) stands with Stolen Generations survivors, their families, and communities. We recognise that healing is ongoing, requiring more sustainable supports, investment, and workforce development, to ensure culturally safe and responsive healing spaces with high quality, trauma aware and healing informed care and services are provided to meet survivors and their family’s needs and priorities.

Eighteen years on from the Apology, IAHA supports the Healing Foundation’s call for immediate, tangible action to finally implement the Bringing Them Home recommendations, with only 5 of 83 recommendations fully implemented to date.

Stolen Generations survivors continue to experience significantly poorer health, social and emotional wellbeing, and life outcomes than other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These impacts are lifelong and intergenerational, and they place urgent demands on health and aged care systems that remain underprepared to respond.

Allied health professionals play a critical role in trauma-informed and trauma aware care, social and emotional wellbeing, disability support, aged care, and community-based healing. A greater investment in and improved access to allied health, strengthening the diversity of care can better support the needs of survivors and their families.

“Our ways of healing are critical and are determined by individuals, their families and communities. Culturally centred, supported and holistic, healing can be in clinical settings, community healing centres, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing services or within our kinship systems. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander allied health workforce can contribute significantly as a skilled, holistic and culturally safe and responsive resource in our communities” said IAHA.

With survivors now aged 50 and over, time is running out. Failure to act is being experienced not as delay, but as ongoing harm. IAHA echoes calls for a time-limited, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led Action Plan (2026–2027) to accelerate implementation — including targeted investment in:

• Social, emotional and cultural wellbeing services

• Trauma aware and healing informed, culturally safe models of care

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander allied health workforce growth and support

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community-controlled services and/or healing centres as determined

by survivors and their families.

On this anniversary, IAHA calls on governments to move beyond words, and to invest implementing the recommendations in full — now, not later.

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Media enquiries:

Paul Gibson

Chief Operating Officer

Indigenous Allied Health Australia

(02) 6285 1010 | paul@iaha.com.au