Changes in transcultural nursing and its influence on the growth of Australian aboriginal children.

The health of Australian Aboriginal people is reportedly poor. This report discusses how nurses, over a generation, have helped improve the health of children at an Aboriginal community in Queensland, Australia. By delivering health services using the principles of transcultural nursing, the nurses were able to deliver culturally congruent nursing care. This empowered the families to become active seekers of health care, rather than passive recipients

Influence of families on the growth of children in an Aboriginal community

Some Aboriginal children have poor growth while others grow according to international standards. This study was designed to find whether these differences were related to families. Data were obtained on 13 families at Cherbourg Aboriginal Community in Queensland. There were data on the growth and hospital admissions of children in these families for at least two generations. Data were taken from records of the Infant Health Clinic and Hospital on the Community. A total of 606 children were considered. The growth of a child during infancy is correlated with the growth of his/her mother in infancy, but not with the growth of the father. We have therefore defined families in the matrilineal line. There were marked and highly significant differences between the growth of children in the 13 families. The families with good growth in one generation were likely to have good growth of children in the next generation. In spite of the overall improvements in the growth of infants and children at Cherbourg, families tended to maintain their rankings from one generation to the next. It would be cost‐efficient to target health advice to those families who have, in the past, had poor growth among their children. Copyrigh

A study of errors that can occur when weighing infants

When infants are weighed at well baby or infant welfare clinics, the weight change from one visit to the next is used as a guide to the welfare of the child. Infant welfare clinic nurses are expert clinicians who use weight measurements as a rough indicator of well-being only, as it is well known by them that these measurements are fraught with error. This paper calculates the amount of error which was found in repeated tests of weights of infants, and in the weight changes brought about by biological variation. As a result, it is recommended that babies under nine months of age be weighed at clinic visits no less than a fortnight apart, and older infants, at least one month apart. If they are weighed more often, then the weight changes detected will be less than the amount of error which affects the measurements

Patterns of weight growth in Aboriginal children on Queensland communities

Abstract We have used data from existing health records to study the birthweights and percentage weights for age (%W/A) of children in five Aboriginal communities in Queensland. The data are from cohorts of children born in the 1950s‐80s at Cherbourg, the 1960s‐80s at Yarrabah and the 1970s‐80s in Woorabinda, Palm Island and Doomadgee. Birthweights have not changed significantly in any of the communities and generally remain below the international level. The weights for 1 and 5 year old children have improved significantly at Cherbourg and Palm Island, but have dropped significantly at Doomadgee. The overall pattern is for children on remote communities to have a lower %W/A and less improvement in %W/A than those closer to population centres. Other workers have found the same pattern elsewhere. These patterns of growth are probably not directly related to the level of general health services, but rather to other facilities available and attitudes of mothers to child care. The results also show that Aboriginal children can reach international levels of %W/A, so the poor growth in many communities is potentially preventable. Copyrigh

The accuracy of weighing infants

Normal physiological processes can alter the weight of an infant by ± 80 g a day. Variations in measured weight and in measured changes in weight cannot be reduced by better scales or better techniques