About the exhibition
The exhibition demonstrates how the various services complement each other to provide complete child-focused continuity of care within a multi-disciplinary context from birth until to 18 years of age.At the time of its opening in 1987, the Monash Medical Centre was considered to belong to the outer suburban fringes of Melbourne. Today, we may observe that this is no longer the case, as Southern Health is perceived to be the largest metropolitan health provider in Melbourne’s South Eastern growth corridor. It is appropriate that Southern Health is addressing children’s services in all sorts of new ways, given that 24% of people in the City of Monash are born overseas while a third of its population speaks a language other than English. In the City of Casey, where Southern Health’s newest hospital has been operating since 2004, we are witnessing an extraordinary baby boom, which also happens to be the most prolific population growth area in Victoria. This city is Victoria’s biggest provider of maternal and child health services, with 4000 babies born in the city in the last financial year.
Paediatrics addresses the developmental period, which is between birth and a person’s eighteenth birthday. Child health promotes, protects and maintains the health and wellbeing of children. How we perceive childhood greatly influences how a society treats its children. Children over many centuries were placed under considerable stresses by a society, which placed little value on a child’s life. Recognition of childhood (which had to be invented, according to French sociologist, Philippe Ariès, the author of the 1962 book entitled Centuries of Childhood: a social history of family life) is essential in the provision of services for children.
Australian children in general are much healthier than they were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Queen Vic and Prince Henry’s Hospital (known in 1910 as the Homoeopathic Hospital) opened children’s wards. Historical changes in our perspective of childhood have resulted in the establishment and recognition of paediatric specialties. As a result, the considerable mortality and morbidity of the 1930s and 1940s due to infectious disease has virtually disappeared. However, in the mid-1970s, Haggerty distinguished what he termed as the “new morbidity” of a complacent society that was concerned with handicapping conditions, learning disabilities and behavioural disorders in childhood. In the 1970s in Victoria, asthma was still prevalent among children while Crohn’s disease saw a steady increase.
The same decade saw an unprecedented interest in SIDS, where although the number of cot deaths per year has now decreased as a result of greater awareness, the precise causes thereof are still unknown. Although risks for childhood obesity were first identified in the 1970s, it is only now through awareness created by Australian of the Year, Fiona Stanton, that we are realising that a reduced life expectancy of life presents a real threat to obese Australian children.
In the period during which Southern Health has taken it children’s services to where they are needed most in the Cities of Bayside, Casey, Dandenong, Kingston, and Monash, new perspectives of childhood health have emerged through the identification of problems including childhood obesity, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), anaphylaxis (due to peanut allergy) and increased incidence of type 2 diabetes in children. All of the above-named councils are working together with health service providers such as Southern Health to ensure that there are enough Child and Maternal Health nurses available at community health centres where there is great demand for this important role. Since Southern Health views paediatrics as extending care to the whole child, it ensures that the teaching of medicine, surgery and psychiatry in the paediatric medical world is integrated.