Empowering parents and care givers with vital first aid skills

Grace Larson was named as the winner of the 2024 Victorian AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award and the national runner-up for her extensive work to address the unfair health disadvantages faced by rural children.

Grace, a dedicated paediatric intensive care nurse with more than 17 years’ experience from Mia Mia, Victoria, is empowering local parents and caregivers across rural Australia to identify preventable illness and decrease the need for rural children to seek specialised services in urban areas.

“I’ve teamed up with my sister Skye Larson to deliver The Sisterhood Project, a non-profit initiative that addresses the unfair disadvantages faced by rural children which aims to break down barriers hindering parents and caregivers from accessing vital training when it comes to illness recognition, accident prevention and basic first aid,” Grace said.

“The statistics are quite jarring in terms of outcomes for country kids – we are looking at nearly three classrooms of country kids die from preventable accidents and injuries each year compared to one classroom full of their metropolitan counterparts.”

As president and co-founder of The Sisterhood Project, Grace will be a guest speaker at Country Lifestyle on Wednesday, September 18 at 12.45pm. 

The Sisterhood Project works to support families in disadvantaged areas, low social demographic regions, and culturally linguistically diverse communities.

A tailored and collaborative approach is used to overcome the barriers for parents or carers to save their child in an emergency. 

“We engage community groups that support these cohorts and parents and carers themselves, to better understand the barriers. We then come up with a training solution to resolve as many of these as possible,” Grace said. 

“The Sisterhood Project provides the funds, transport and childcare support to allow the mothers to attend a course and learn vital lifesaving skills, and how to recognise a serious respiratory illness in their child or how to perform CPR.” 

As the winner of the 2024 Victorian AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award, Grace received $15,000 from Westpac to further support her project and the opportunity to undertake a professional development course of her choosing.

She represented Victoria in August at the AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award gala dinner and national announcement in Canberra where the national winner took home an additional $20,000 Westpac grant and herself as the national runner up $15,000.

The Sisterhood project aims to develop a mobile phone app to connect first aid providers with organisations and people in need and roll out first aid courses across Victoria for disadvantaged families. 

The Project is supporting First Nations parents and carers in Shepparton by funding child first aid courses through Rumbalara Aboriginal Cooperative, as well as the Maternal Child Health Nurse parent’s group.

The Project also received a grant of from National Australia Bank for its pilot program for young mothers in Shepparton through The Bridge Youth Service, teaching vital skills such as CPR, identifying respiratory illness and choking first aid. 

Grace and her team are working with specialist education providers to tailor the courses to make them easier to digest and take part in for rural and remote communities in Gippsland, NSW and Western Australia. 

Grace said the Sisterhood Project had undergone rapid growth since it was founded three years ago.

“Our first course in NSW is for a community group based in Sydney and catering for immigrants without access to the Medicare system. We have plans to roll out courses across regional and rural areas of NSW and Queensland,” she said. 

“We are hoping to produce an app that is accessible to the 6.5 million parents and carers in Australia to provide training and a guide for emergency first aid. It will be an offline product, so it is not reliant on internet service in remote areas. 

“It is a multi-modal approach using technology to further our reach. All parents and carers should have access to this information and feel empowered to manage their children’s health emergencies no matter where they live, their bank balances or what language they speak at home.”