Ishar Multicultural Women’s Clinic to benefit from grant

A MULTICULTURAL women’s health clinic in Mirrabooka is set to upgrade its medical services and equipment to accommodate about 3000 patients.

Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Care received a $9504 grant from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development’s stronger communities program.

The grant will go towards a new hand basin, an instrument sterilisation machine, tables for meetings and classes, and provide training for staff.

Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Care chief executive Andrea Creado said the new steriliser would enable check-ups and procedures to be more efficient.

“A lot of the women are either from refugee or migrant background from all over the world that have a low-socioeconomic background,” she said.

“We do not have a steriliser so we would send the women to another surgery that has a steriliser and ask them to do it for us.

“Having to sterilise in-house it would allow us to be a lot more efficient.”

Ms Creado said most patients were from the Mirrabooka area but some would travel far for their services.

“There are not many doctors that can provide bulk billing for peoples’ pregnancy needs,” she said.

“More importantly, a lot of the women would like to have access to an interpreter…we do make allowance for that.”

Stirling MP Michael Keenan said residents would benefit from Ishar’s improved services.

“Ishar promotes good health and wellbeing for women from all cultural backgrounds, and delivers services in response to the needs of our local community,” he said.

“This funding will deliver improvements that will help the centre meet increasing demand for affordable community-based and culturally sensitive women’s health services.”