Maternal, Child and Youth Health

Child Health provides information and education to parents and carers for children from birth to 18 years of age.  The service provides:

• Well health checks
• Developmental assessments
• Immunisations
• Catch up immunisations
• Breastfeeding information
• Sleep settling information
• Mums and Bubs groups for first time mothers
• Circle of security
• 4 week home visits
• Self-weigh facilities

The Hearing Health Team is a health worker led model providing a screening service to all primary, state and private schools within the NWHHS.

School students from Prep to Grade 4 are screened with otoscopy, tympanometry and audiometry.  Children are referred on for more definitive care.

We engage in consultation with the schools and communities to deliver a service focused on long term improvement of ear health outcomes for children and their families.

We are committed to creating long term changes across education, health and early year’s services to better manage ear health conditions.

The School Based Youth Health Nurse (SBYHN) supports Secondary State Schools in the NWHHS.  They provide a service to Spinifex Senior and Junior Campus’, Cloncurry, Doomadgee, Mornington Island and Normanton.

The SBYHN works within the school community to:

• Provide information on health and wellbeing
• Create a more supportive, healthy school environment – health promoting schools
• Connect students, teachers and families to other support services within the school community and outside of the school community
• Provide brief intervention and referral to appropriate services

The SBYHN work with the school to identify and act on issues that may affect the health of students and school community, working within the curriculum and presenting on a wide range of learning activities with teachers. 

This program provides vision screening to all children in NWHHS schools enrolled in Prep. A nurse screens all children and refers any child that is identified needing follow up to definitive service.

Children from six months to five years of age are eligible for point of care lead testing. Staff provide the service in line with well health check and on an appointment basis. We provide education and information to parents and carers in line with the Lead Alliance information on how best to ‘live with lead'.