Addressing the well‐being of Aboriginal children in out‐of‐home care: Are we there yet?

Shanti Raman · Rabia Khan

33 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Paediatrics and Child Health

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Child Welfare and Adoption Child and Adolescent Health Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

Abstract

AIM: Children in out-of-home care (OOHC) have well-documented health and developmental needs. In Australia, Aboriginal children have significantly worse health outcomes than non-Aboriginal children. We wanted to identify the health and well-being of Aboriginal children entering OOHC, placed with an Aboriginal organisation, who accessed a specialised multidisciplinary clinic in south-western Sydney. We wanted to identify children entering care who were doing well and who improved in care. We also wanted to identify enablers and barriers to care. METHODS: We analysed records of the first 100 children attending the OOHC clinic in south-western Sydney. Measures included clinical outcomes and recommendations at first and subsequent visits. Descriptive statistics were calculated using SPSS 16.0 for Windows (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Key stakeholders from the relevant agencies were interviewed about enablers and barriers to care by independent evaluators. RESULTS: A significant proportion of children had health needs identified including speech delay (54%), under-immunisation (50%), behaviour problems (45%), hearing problems (44%), visual problems (35%) and dental problems (36%). Sixteen per cent of the children were doing well at first visit; a third improved in care, and a third remained stable. Significant differences were identified in health and educational needs between the under-5 year olds and the 5-13 year olds. Key barriers identified were systemic issues and lack of resources for intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Children attending this clinic had similar rates of problems identified as other studies. School-age children appear to have significant additional health needs. Targeted developmentally and culturally appropriate interventions need to be provided to address the identified barriers to care.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

References

2005Child protection Australia 2003-04 2000Health Care Needs of Children in the Foster Care System 1994Assessing the Health Status of Children Entering Foster Care 2005Developmental and Behavioral Needs and Service Use for Young Children in Child Welfare 2006Mental health of children in foster and kinship care in New South Wales, Australia 2001The Predictors of Unsuccessful Transition to Foster Care 2019Vaccine Preventable Diseases and Vaccination Coverage in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, Australia, 2011–2015 1998Relationship Between Reason for Placement and Medical Findings Among Children in Foster Care

Cited by

2021Mental health help seeking in young people and carers in out of home care: A systematic review 2017Taking culture seriously: Can we improve the developmental health and well‐being of Australian Aboriginal children in out‐of‐home care?2020Foster and kinship carer experiences of accessing healthcare: A qualitative study of barriers, enablers and potential solutions 2020Developmental risk among Aboriginal children living in urban areas in Australia: the Study of Environment on Aboriginal Resilience and Child Health (SEARCH)

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.