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 the Preventing of Child Abuse & Neglect


Presenting Author

Brenda Hynes, National Clinical Advisor (Nursing)

Organisation

Royal New Zealand Plunket Society (Inc), Wellington


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 the involves many agencies using a mix of skills and methods?

Presentation Format

Paper

Biography

My background is nursing and I currently hold the role of National Clinical Advisor (Nursing) for the Royal Plunket Society. I sit on a number of working parties involved in the family violence area including being a member of NGO Family Violence Group, Te Rito natioanl executive and a member of the Advisory Group to the Ministrial Taskforce regarding Violence within Families. I have 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.