Whittlesea is one of 65 Victorian councils to have signed up to help design a new data management system for maternal and child health services.
Municipal Association of Victoria president Bill McArthur said last week the association’s maternal and child health (MCH) service information technology project would transform the way important information about Victorian children is handled.
“The project will increase the security of family data, provide a holistic picture of the needs of a child and its family and give more reliable and consistent information in support of service development and the targeting of programs,” Cr McArthur said.
“The new system will improve capability and capacity to manage and assist vulnerable children, produce higher-quality data to support family assistance and higher-quality aggregated population health data.”
He said the urgent need for this system was also outlined in the Protecting Victoria’s Vulnerable Children Inquiry, and the current project grew out of an Auditor-General report in 2013 that found a system-wide process was needed for managing reliable and accurate MCH data.
Whittlesea’s ‘family, children and young people’ manager Mary Sayers said accurate information was imperative for councils to be able to plan for services.
“Any improvements in maternal child health information technology will be able to provide better-quality data for policy, planning and service delivery and a more co-ordinated response to the needs of the community.”
Victoria’s MCH service follows up all birth notifications and provides population-based data for all children in Victoria as well as identifying the appropriate support and referrals needed for families and children.
Cr McArthur said a $2 million funding boost from the state government would help get the project under way following a workshop in September with stakeholders. “With the
government funding, we can now proceed to stage two of the project, which involves a tender process to secure a systems developer.”
Cr McArthur said that, once complete, the project would provide councils and governments with validated data that would inform more accurate funding decisions by
the state.
