New child health monitor launched

A new website to track the health and wellbeing of New Zealand children will be launched by the Paediatric Society today, and it will expose our welfare shortcomings, says a child welfare group.

The Children's Social Health Monitor, to be launched at the society's annual conference in Hamilton, will track the effects of the economic downturn on child health and poverty.

"(It) will track the economic wellbeing of New Zealand children and their families over the next few years, along with a range of conditions which might be expected to change during the downturn," New Zealand Child and Youth Epidemiology Service director Elizabeth Craig said.

"If we find that child health outcomes are deteriorating, this will be brought to the attention of policy makers so that appropriate responses can be implemented."

The Health Monitor was developed by seven organisations concerned with the wellbeing of children, as well as university academics.

Dr Craig said information already gathered for the initiative showed New Zealand children experienced a "large number" of hospital admissions due to their socio-economic conditions, and about 20 percent of children relied on a benefit recipient.

"Yet another report; yet another nail in the coffin of New Zealand's reputation as a great place to bring up children," said Murray Edridge, chairman of Every Child Counts.

He congratulated NZ Child and Youth Epidemiology Service on establishing the monitor. Such data needed to be collected and inform the decisions of politicians, he said.

The report emphasised the connection between poverty and deprivation and child health.

Mr Edridge said the report made some international comparisons of countries care of children during recession.

"In Peru, for example, child mortality rates climbed. In Sweden they did not. Why? Because Sweden has a much more comprehensive welfare safety net including free child health care.

"Successive governments here in New Zealand have declined to re-set our core benefits to more adequate levels for fear of entrenching benefit dependency among adults.

"Instead they have entrenched New Zealand's internationally high levels of poverty among children because, as many reports have noted, most of our child poverty is among children cared for by an adult on the benefit."

The numbers were now increasing in the present recession and the authors of the monitor expected to see our child hospitalisation rates and mortality rates increase in the coming months and years, he said.

"Just as significantly, the hidden effects of children leaving school without qualifications and not getting a job will have long term effects upon our economy and future living standards."