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When Marcus was 18 months old, he needed surgery to have grommets inserted to try and combat infection. In Dubbo, where the family was living, there was a two year wait for the procedure. “Developmentally, he wasn’t where he needed to be and he was going to get even further behind,” says Marlie. “I was really worried.”

Marcus’s plight reached Newcastle ear, nose and throat specialist and University of Newcastle Professor Kelvin Kong AM who has been leading the use of telehealth to treat patients in regional and remote communities. The model is an extension of his ongoing research into the prevalence of middle ear disease among Indigenous children such as Marcus.

Kelvin explained to Marlie the link between Marcus’s delayed speech development and ear infections. “It all made sense,” says Marlie. “He didn’t have anything wrong with his brain. He just couldn’t hear properly.”

"Hearing loss is a developmental emergency. Delayed treatment can create all kinds of issues and affect every aspect of a person’s life." - Professor Kelvin Kong AM

“For kids, especially when it comes to poor ear health, they struggle to learn. Zero to three is probably the most important time in [terms of] the development of hearing. There are so many different environmental sounds – singing, laughter, nature. Grandparents, uncles, parents, talking to the child. And so, when you get to three, four years of age, you've got all this input and your brain’s connecting all these neural pathways. This allows a child to participate in education. Education leads to jobs. Job satisfaction makes you happy, helps you build a life. What we know from research we've done that if you don't hear well, you're not going to progress well", says Kelvin.

A middle ear infection known medically as Otitis Media can be bacterial or viral. It is a rite of passage for most Aussie kids and is typically easily treated. For Indigenous children, though, persistent infections can be life-altering. Ruptured ear drums and speech delay are common. Kelvin is at pains to emphasise that it is not just a “remote community problem”.

“In the remote communities, ear disease [in Indigenous children] is 10 times the rate of the normal population,” he says. “In the urban communities, about four times the rate. People say it's not as bad in urban communities, but if your child, an Aboriginal child, has four times the rate in Newcastle, then you’re going to have a lot more issues with schooling, learning, and behaviour.”

Kelvin’s commitment to telehealth, which pre-dates the arrival of COVID-19, stems from his focus on empowering communities and removing barriers that prevent timely access to services. He has led the development of a model that sees regional and remote health workers, who are often Indigenous, take down a patient’s history and supplement this with photos to share with city-based specialists. “The health workers are on the ground in communities and you’re helping to build capacity and leadership. I just become the conduit to providing health care.”

The other benefit of connecting with communities this way is the much-needed increase in the number of children who can be treated. “I can provide training to the health worker, and they can see 50 kids and screen them. I may only need to intervene for 20 of them and they’ll get accelerated through the health worker. For a kid with ear discharge, waiting for an ENT could take months whereas the health worker can take a photo of the ear and send it to me. ‘Kelvin, what do you think? I’m going to look at doing this, this, this and this’. They can clean the ear, give them drops. It builds confidence in the community health worker. They can take another photo in four days, monitor the kid, and by the time they come to a clinic they’ve had treatment, and we can look more closely if there are complications.”

Evidence has shown that this model helps improve outcomes for children in regional and remote areas. In Marcus’s case it reduced the wait for surgery from two years to three months and therefore preventing further developmental delays.

Kelvin Kong is a man on a mission. He divides his long work hours across four key roles – surgeon, researcher, lecturer and father– but the proud Worimi man has a single long-term goal for the University of Newcastle. “To be the best place in Australia to study Indigenous health and be supported as an Aboriginal researcher in any field,” he says. “This isn’t just about funding my research. We’re talking about transformative change across the University – senior positions of leadership for Aboriginal people, recruiting and supporting Aboriginal academics, systemic and structural change.”

榴莲成人app下载 of Newcastle has a long and proud history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research. “The role of the University has always been to allow different ideas and to bring the community along with us,” says Kelvin. “They're allowing us the space to dream big and to focus on Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous capacity.”

Between surgical procedures and lectures in allied health, Kelvin leads an Ear project group at the Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI), which is investigating all things Otitis Media, including Alloiococcus Otitidis , an organism found to be more prevalent in ear disease. The group is working on studies of pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance among Indigenous and non-Indigenous trial groups with the hope of developing new treatments.

Bacteria samples are taken during surgery from young patients and analysis such as DNA sequencing is then carried out in the lab. “We’re growing the bugs and we’re going to try and develop an organoid cell model, which is creating 3-dimensional replicas of the middle ear in a healthy and diseased state,” Kelvin says. “With a ‘bad ear’ in the lab we can try different treatments to see what works best rather than doing it on the child.”

Relationships are at the core of the work being done to support change at the University and Kelvin is a valued mentor to early career Indigenous researchers such as 35-year-old Dr Guy Cameron, who is part of the HMRI team. “He’s a lab rat,” laughs Kelvin. “Guy’s going to be super star within five years or so. We’re seeing more and more young Aboriginal researchers coming up in this space now and that's really cool. His capacity to understand concepts at a higher level is important, but more important is his ability to translate the research for communities.”

It’s this work beyond the laboratory that also drives Guy. “Kelvin is focused on making sure community is at the centre of what we do,” he says. “In the past, research was carried out on us and not with us. Kelvin makes sure we’re embedding community in the work from the get-go. I’m passionate about this.”

"The historical problem with research is that it’s always been about the benefit of the researcher or the benefit the research institution, not necessarily for the community. And we're trying to flip that around" - Professor Kelvin Kong AM

Kelvin says, "One of the things we’ve done recently is we’ve developed a community panel [Wukul Yabang] where we have more than 40 members with a lot of Indigenous knowledge – scientists, doctors, community workers, practitioners, health workers, nurses, administrators – and when you want to do research in Indigenous health, you need to present your request, and it needs to be approved. One of the nice things about this is that the community can then feed back to the researcher and say, ‘Well, have you thought about this?’

While the University of Newcastle team is making great strides, there’s so much more that can be done. Support for this research is vital.

Marlie appreciates Kelvin’s ability to explain what’s going on with Marcus in a way that she can understand. “He has a hole in his eardrum and that’s the next challenge we have to deal with,” she says, “but we’re prepared for another surgery, and Kelvin will make sure Marcus is looked after.”

It is children such as Marcus that motivate Kelvin. He has witnessed the joy of children who hear rain on a roof or a kookaburra for the first time. "What breaks my heart is that this is not rocket science. And my ultimate goal is – and I think it probably solidified more so when I had children myself – that all children across this beautiful nation have the opportunity to be whatever they want to be."