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Page Last Updated:
Wednesday, 25 July 2012
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Home>Health Services>Maternal and Child Health Centres
Maternal and Child Health Services are provided at 9 locations throughout the Shire.
The fully qualified and experienced Maternal and Child Health Nurses provide care and advice for families of children aged 0-6 years.
Services include contacting the families of all new babies in the Shire within seven days of discharge from hospital, regular child health monitoring, ongoing parenting education, family wellbeing, developmental assessments and referrals as appropriate.
The fully qualified and experienced Maternal & Child Health Nurses are committed to providing the very best service possible to families with babies and young children.
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| Still Vitally Important To Mothers
Name changes over the years have not diminished the importance of mother’s and baby’s health.
The Baby Health Centre Infant Welfare and now Maternal and Child Health were all created by local government to help mothers and their babies get through those early years.
Colac’s first Baby Health Centre was established in 1925 in the Colac Soldiers Memorial Rooms in Hesse Street. By 1936 mothers and babies enjoyed the facilities in a new centre in Queen Street.
In 1959, the centres in Mark Street, Colac at a cost of 14,000 pounds, (since closed) and Cororooke were opened with nurses kept busy caring for baby boomers.
In Hebb’s history book on Colac he acknowledges the importance of the Infant Welfare ladies committee giving “splendid service to the working of this valuable community service”.
Today, Colac Otway Shire employs five permanent part time nurses with additional casual nurses providing 9 venues for all mothers and babies across the Shire.
Maternal and Child health nurses provide support and advice to the families of the 270 and more births a year in the Shire. There are over 1000 children seen each year. With an average of 450 mothers and babies each month.
Over this past 75 years illnesses such as polio and diphtheria have largely been eliminated due to the services at Maternal and Child Health centres and the Shire’s immunisation programs. However, there is a constant need to continue these programmes to ensure that new cases of measles and whooping cough do not occur and that other vaccine preventable diseases such as meningoccal infections are reduced.
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