“Each additional life saved is another family’s lifetime of trauma avoided.” Photo: Jim Rice
Few Australians would consider that this country has much to worry about when it comes to the rates of infant and child deaths. Such deaths sadly still happen, but at nothing like the rates seen in developing countries, or in the pages of a Dickens novel. Nothing to see here, at least not in the cities, where mothers and babies have ready access to healthcare workers and hospitals.
It is true that infant and child death rates have fallen dramatically in recent years – down by 33 per cent in Australia from 2005 to 2012 alone – but it might surprise many to find that Australia still has plenty of room to improve. The OECD ranks us halfway down the pack out of 30 developed nations, and there is a wide gap between Australia’s statistics and those of the best performers. Much as we like to rank ourselves among the healthiest nations, our rates of infant and child death are still two to three times higher than in the best-performing countries.
The National Health Performance Authority report published on Thursday clearly shows in which parts of Australia efforts to reduce death among babies and young children will reap the greatest benefits. The report is the first to report children’s death rates for each of 61 local areas nationally. It finds death rates among children up to the age of five can be more than double the average in some local areas, even when the comparison is restricted to areas that are broadly similar in terms of wealth and distance to major towns and cities.
By any measure, these are startling findings. As with the Performance Authority’s previous reports, it is information that has remained hidden in other statistics that focus on national or state-level averages, beneath which the highs and the lows remain camouflaged.