Southern Moreton Bay Islands Child Health Connector Program

⁠⁠⁠The Brisbane South PHN has been leading the Southern Moreton Bay Islands (SMBI) community impact initiative for approximately 3 years. The initiative focuses on supporting a community-led approach to improving health outcomes for children 0-8 years and their families. As part of this approach, Brisbane South PHN has been a systems convenor in supporting large organisations such as Children's Health Queensland, Metro South Health and Education Queensland to re-orient their services towards obtaining greater community impact.

Brisbane South PHN has been working closely with SMBI Listeners, a neutral community-led entity that is engaging deeply with community, with the intent of building broad community ownership of child and family issues and ultimately, broader social and health issues.

One of the priority areas for collective action across the SMBI community and service providers has been the need to improve child health outcomes and ensure readiness for school. This priority was identified through a Community Governance Group made up of service providers and community leaders.

Brisbane South PHN has established a working group consisting of community leaders, health providers, Education Queensland, local schools, etc to identify ideas to help improve/address the issues (problems) identified by community, and design, test and learn from what is being implemented. To date, a number of system and practice changes have occurred including a SMBI Child Health phone number, social media options including awareness of child health nurses, increased health presence and engagement in playgroups and improved transition processes between midwives and child health.

Data and community insights have reflected the need to build a more significant (trusted) relationship across health partners, with families accessing services as well as between health service providers and other key partners in a child and family's life. (e.g. Playgroups and schools).

The SMBI Child Health Connector program is one element of this model which will seek to improve connections between health services and families and remove barriers for them to enable more effective access to child health and specialist services.