The Child Mortality Research Program

Investigators: Akilew Adane, Brad Farrant, Carrington Shepherd, Fiona Stanley, Helen Bailey

The death of a child before birth or in early life is a tragedy for families. While there are fewer early deaths than in past decades, there continues to be too many Australian children who die from potentially preventable causes each year.

About one-half of all child deaths and three-quarters of youth deaths in Australia are considered to be potentially avoidable, i.e., possibly prevented or treated. For children, these include SIDS, drowning, burns, falls and some infections. Diabetes, suicide and road traffic accidents claim the lives of many young adults.

Our Child Mortality Research Program is focused on providing insights that can help reduce the number of children who die from potentially preventable causes. Our small team has monitored mortality patterns in early life for many years, using our unique database of infant, child and youth deaths. Our research work continues to highlight the causes of early deaths and how these have changed over time.

While this important work tells us what children are dying from, it tells us less about what could have been done to prevent a death.

We are now expanding our program of work. We will, with appropriate funding, undertake a comprehensive series of advanced population studies that can provide greater insights into the specific pathways to death in the early stages of life. We are also expanding the scope of our program, to look at the neglected and critically important issue of stillbirth.

We are taking a population-level approach to our research, using the world-class health data that is available from the acclaimed WA Data Linkage System. The benefit of this population approach is that new findings can support strategies that are of value to the whole community.

Project Objective

The overall objective of this new research is to guide the development of practical interventions and health strategies that:

• Prevent poor health and death in early life;
• Improve health outcomes and quality of life for children at early developmental risk, and
• Potentially improve the circumstances of families that experience an unexpected or sudden death.