Health efforts slammed as sick kids on rise

By Paul Yandall

The Health Funding Authority believes South Auckland Health can do more to stem the rising tide of sick children turning up at its doors.

A Counties Manukau Health Council report criticises the slow progress being made to improve the health of the area's children.

Despite changes made since 1994 by South Auckland Health to integrate childcare services, almost no progress has been made in arresting the slide, says the Child Health Status Report. More South Auckland children, particularly brown children, are getting sick.

Authority spokeswoman Sue Keppel said she was concerned that the benefits of the changes made in the past few years were yet to be seen.

South Auckland Health could still do plenty to ensure it worked more closely with the community, she said. The health body runs Middlemore Hospital and provides community health and mental health services. "It is not necessarily about funding," Sue Keppel said. "Providers need to look at doing things differently and making changes to improve care to patients.

"There also needs to be greater effort to deliver the services to meet the needs of the different cultural groups."

Nettie Knetsch, South Auckland Health manager of child youth services, said many initiatives such as specialist outpatient services and community paediatrics programmes had been started.

A new children's hospital and emergency department were being built at Middlemore, and the hospital catered well for sick children, she said.

"What we aren't doing well, unfortunately, is keeping kids well right from the day they are born."

New community care services to be launched by January were part of the hospital's efforts to prevent sickness.

But the health council report says a lot more can be done to prevent children slipping through the cracks.

"What we need is a system that picks up a sick child at the GP's and follows him right through to the system," said chairman Len Brown.

The report highlights the high cot-death rate of Maori children and a rise in vision and hearing test failures among Pacific Island children.

Report author and health researcher Joy Simpson said if there was one message from the report it was: Enough is enough.

"Despite the information, despite the community involvement, despite the initiatives, the status of children in South Auckland has deteriorated."

Pacific Island community health worker Alice Meredith said the Government had to do more to help families to escape the poverty trap.

Associate Health Minister Georgina te Heuheu said the Government was committed to improving the health of those in low socio-economic areas such as South Auckland. Maori and Pacific Island children would be a priority.

The Child Health Strategy released a year ago, and only now being implemented at the cost of $13.25 million a year, would focus on health promotion, early intervention and better coordination of services.