Over the last 13 years, the Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committee has documented the higher death rates for children living in more remote regions of the State. The death rate for children living in different parts of South Australia can be seen in more detail in the interactive visualisation below. This map includes all deaths of children who were residents of South Australia and who died in South Australia between 2005 and 2016 inclusive.
This higher rate of death in more remote regions of South Australia is evident across all categories of death. For instance, children outside of metropolitan Adelaide are three times more likely than children in metropolitan Adelaide to die in a transport crash. This example illustrates some of the challenges of providing services to remote areas. Even if roads in remote areas were of comparable safety to roads in metropolitan Adelaide, children in remote areas may spend more time in vehicles accessing services than their metropolitan counterparts, which may expose them to greater risk of dying in a transport crash. The figure below illustrates these differences across major categories of death.
The World Health Organization states that equity is ‘the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically or geographically.’ The geographic disparity between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas of South Australia is a remediable difference. The continued disparity in death rates across the regions of this State is contrary to the view that all children in South Australia should have equal rights.
Go to the Committee’s latest Annual Report to learn more about how it defines both remoteness and these categories of death as well as what the Committee has recommended to address issues arising from the deaths of children in South Australia.