Avoidable hospitalisations in Aboriginal children too high

It doesn't matter if children live in a poor area or a wealthy area, in the city or remote communities, there is a big gap. New research from The Australian National University (ANU) and UNSW has revealed rates of avoidable hospitalisations among Aboriginal children are almost double those of non-Aboriginal children. The study, the first to investigate avoidable hospitalisations for common childhood conditions in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children, analysed NSW hospital admissions data for more than a million children born between 2000 and 2012. It found more than 365,000 avoidable hospitalisations by December 2013. Aboriginal infants were twice as likely to be hospitalised for conditions that could have been prevented or treated outside of a hospital. Lead researcher Dr Kathleen Falster of the ANU Research School of Population Health and the Sax Institute said more needs to be done to monitor and prevent avoidable hospitalisations in children, especially Aboriginal children. "There should be no difference in avoidable hospitalisations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children," Dr Falster said, who is also a visiting Fellow with the Centre for Big Data Research in Health at UNSW.