Easing theTransition.

Victorian Foundation for survivors of torture, Victorian Foundation for survivors of torture, Melbourne, 2000, 139 pages, $36.00 (plus $5 postage), ISBN 0-9585657-3-2

Easing the transition is subtitled 'A resource guide for health and settlement workers supporting those recently arrived in Australia maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle'. This resource guide is somewhat less of a text than Promoting refugee health, and provides easily implemented ideas, activities and inspiration focused on sharing understanding about diet and lifestyle.

It is A4 size and spiral bound which allows the book to lie flat or fold back on itself. A deck of small cards with drawings of food is provided for use with clients, along with a poster sized outline representation of the Healthy Eating Pyramid to unfold. The guide is targeted to primary health care workers to assist people from refugee backgrounds in their first two years after arrival in Australia, and the steering committee that oversaw its development includes a number of dietitians and nutritionists.

The development of the guide included consultation with new arrivals and the health workers working with them. It consists of three parts: Part one outlines background information on issues relevant to diet and lifestyle for people from refugee backgrounds. It is directed towards broad principles and outlines how primary health care workers could address the identified issues. Part two is the largest section. It is organised by topic, and provides information about each topic, ideas for dealing with it and practical resources that a worker might find useful. The material appears to be oriented towards group activities, although much of the material and the ideas are also useful for work with individuals. Each section has a similar structure with useful sub-headings such as issues for new arrivals, health and nutrition information, strategies, suggested discussion starters, key points to convey, suggested activities and multilingual resources. The sections are well spaced, and make good use of tables and illustrations. Full pages within the guide are designed to be shown or given to people. These are appropriately dominated by illustration (rather than words) and suitable for photocopying.

Part three of the guide provides practical guidance for organising activities suggested in the previous section, and other information without a place elsewhere. The activities that are outlined include group cooking or cooking demonstrations, food tasting, and supermarket or shopping tours. Other issues covered include food labelling, Muslim dietary laws, food safety and organising an interpreter.

The guide provides useful and relevant information in a form which is easy to access and easy to read and use. Above all, this guide is practical--it was developed from discussion with people who have appropriate experience in the area. The guide can be used in a variety of ways--for example, relatively large sections of it can be read to familiarise oneself with the food related concerns of refugees, or a specific section could be referred to when planning a group session, or for review immediately before or after delivery of a session.

The guide was developed to target refugee arrivals from the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. As a result, many of the resources referred to are appropriate to these groups (multilingual resources for example). However, much of the information, and many of the ideas and activities are practical for refugee groups from other regions, and also for low literacy groups who are not refugees. The guide is developed in Victoria, and in some sections this heritage is very clear--for example, there is a section on recreational activities in Melbourne. This only marginally diminishes the usefulness of the guide for other areas of Australia--it is the ideas and principles which are important and the information can be easily replaced by local information. Reference is made to web sites and organisations based throughout Australia and in other countries.

This resource guide deserves to be widely used throughout Australia. A dietitian will find this guide a handy resource for themselves, and to lend to other health workers and community members. The guide is commonsense and practical, and an excellent distilled summary of the extensive experience and ideas of many people.

Malcolm Riley 

Associate Professor, Department of Medicine

Monash University, Melbourne