Wellington City Libraries Palm Tree Blossoming of Our Children - Kia Puawai Ngā Tamariki - 10th Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect

The Role and Evaluation of a Well Child Health Provider in Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect

Author and Speaker

Brenda Hynes

Organisation

Royal New Zealand Plunket Society (inc), Wellington, New Zealand


Family violence, including child abuse and neglect, is a serious problem in New Zealand. To reduce the incidence of child abuse it has been identified that agencies need to work collaboratively. One of the key tasks for developing the Te Rito strategy included "establishing an agreed cross-sector framework and a set of core principles to guide the developmental process".

Over 90% of families in New Zealand choose the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society as their Well Child provider. The presentation will examine what services Plunket provides to assist in the reduction of the incidence of child abuse and neglect. Then i will pose the question - how do we evaluate the effect we do have? Do we evaluate the difference individual services in the prevention sector make or should we be measuring population health outcome - what difference was made to the population as a whole? in the area of family violence, including child abuse and neglect, we know that all agencies (government and non-government) must work collaboratively. How can we measure the difference one organisation has made if this involves many agencies using a mix of skills and methods?

Biography

Brenda Hynes
Brenda Hynes has a background in nursing and currently holds the role of National Clinical Advisor (Nursing) for the Royal Plunket Society. She sits on a number of working parties involved in the family violence area including being a member of the NGO Family Violence Group, Te Rito national executive and the Advisory Group to the Ministerial Taskforce regarding violence within families. Brenda has also worked with both government and non-government agencies on projects including WINZ family violence intervention programme and the development of the New Zealand Standard for Screening, Risk Assessment and Intervention for Family Violence, Child Abuse and Neglect.