Introduction
CORONARY HEART DISEASE
In contemporary Australia, despite improvements due to governmental, non-governmental and private organisations’ efforts over the past decades, the health inequalities between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and non-Aboriginal Australians persist. For example, Aboriginal people have approximately a 10 years shorter life expectancy and are almost 2 times more likely to commit suicide than non-Aboriginal Australians. A large proportion of this gap can be explained by social determinants of health (e.g. education, employment, discrimination) (31%), while behavioural and biomedical factors (e.g. substance use, physical activity, blood pressure) account for a smaller fraction (11%) AIHW [The effects of social support on health have been extensively reported in non-Indigenous populations. High social support is associated with better outcomes in coronary heart disease [The research of social support in Aboriginal Australians, however, has been faced with conceptual challenges: the Aboriginal experiences of social and emotional well-being (SEWB) are connected to the well-being of the land and the community; and, for this reason, are not directly comparable to more individualistic western conceptualizations of “One western-developed psychological instrument that potentially could be used in Aboriginal research is the Social Support Scale (SSS) (