Page 3960 - Week 12 - Thursday, 20 October 2005
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The plan also commits the government to working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to develop services in partnership. The Department of Education and Training and ACT Health have expanded the Koori preschool hearing test program into all Koori preschools for three to five-year-olds. This service, provided by the Winnunga Nimmityjah health centre, has enabled indigenous children to access hearing tests.
Over the past 12 months, ACT Health and the Office for Children, Youth and Family Support have formed even stronger links to meet the often complex needs of younger clients. This has been exhibited, for example, in the MOU that has been established to provide joint care and protection training. To date, 1,450 ACT Health staff have received training. Further targeted training, provided to specialist and front line staff, has commenced and will be continued over this year. The partnership highlights an understanding in government that the responsibility for preventing child abuse must be a whole-of-government, as well as community, commitment. Agencies working together in both the delivery and receipt of child protection training are central to the promotion of shared responsibility and sustainable reform.
The implementation of the children’s plan is driven by the principle of collaboration and integration as a way of achieving genuine quality outcomes. The ACT children’s plan interdepartmental committee, a whole-of-government senior management group, has been driving the reforms at both a program and a systemic level. It acknowledges the real need to bring about a change of culture at an individual program level, as well as better integrated policy.
The children’s plan interdepartmental committee has been making major advancements in the area of promoting evidence-based policy and practice, particularly through its commitment to establish an evaluation framework to measure outcomes for children in the ACT over the life of the plan. This information will then be used to build on proven successes as well as promote a culture that encourages people to critically examine and adopt improved policy and practice. Any evaluation will also take into account work done nationally to improve child health and wellbeing. The national agenda for early childhood, in particular, is an important base for this work.
An important undertaking in terms of removing barriers between the community and government is the commitment to hold the inaugural meeting of the ACT children’s plan network forum later this year. This is an explicit commitment within the children’s plan. It is envisaged that the network forums will be held quarterly, will be topic-based, have a flexible format, and incorporate an open membership. The inaugural forum, titled “Making connections: understanding the possibilities and challenges of working together”, will be held on 9 November 2005 and will be co-sponsored by the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, or NAPCAN, another partnership currently being strengthened through mutual commitment.
I turn now to the implementation of the ACT young people’s plan. The ACT young people’s plan seeks to provide positive outcomes for all young people in the ACT aged between 12 and 25, but particularly those who are at risk. Again, much has been
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