This eighteenth annual report, presented to Parliament by the Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committee, provides a summary of the Committee’s data analyses, reviews of child deaths, and activities undertaken to prevent the death or serious injury of children and young people.
In 2022, 107 children and young people died in South Australia. At the time of writing this annual report, information on causes of death for about a quarter of these child deaths was not available to the Committee. The Committee will publish a more detailed statistical report in 2024.
During the 2022–23 reporting period, the Committee continued to review child deaths in South Australia and to make and monitor recommendations for intervention and prevention on a range of issues, including:
- recognition of the cumulative harm created by the longstanding neglect of the needs of vulnerable children
- expanding intensive family support services to better protect at-risk children and young people
- fundamentally changing the ways in which the needs of Aboriginal infants, children and young people, and their families, are conceptualised and met
- the need to develop an effective across-agency response to the neglect of critical medical care needs of children and young people.
The Committee has continued to improve its knowledge and understanding of issues that impact children and young people, build its strategic alliances both within the state and nationally, and develop its database and reporting system. The Committee has also provided project support to facilitate discussions between states and territories with the aim of developing a national child death data collection. The focus over the past twelve months has been on documenting each jurisdiction’s legislation, governance and processes for data collection.
The 2022-23 Annual Report is available for download.