WELCOME
Welcome to the sixth edition of Children & Youth News, the newsletter of the ABS’ National Children and Youth Statistics Unit. Children & Youth News is designed to highlight developments in children and youth related statistics and provides links to recent data releases relevant to the field.
UPDATE ON INFORMATION DEVELOPMENT PLAN
The National Children and Youth Statistics Unit (NCYSU) has recently completed work on a draft Information Development Plan for the children and youth field. The draft Plan, entitled Improving Statistics on Children and Youth: An Information Development Plan, presents an overview of the key policy issues, stakeholders and data sources relevant to the field; the data development needs identified to date; and data development actions already underway to address these needs.
Over the next month the NCYSU will be consulting with relevant agencies at the State and Territory level to gather comments on the draft Plan and identify additional data development actions to address data gaps and deficiencies. If you would like to review the draft Plan please contact Lesley Martin on lesley.martin@abs.gov.au. Closing date for comments is 3 March 2006.
It is intended that a final version of the Plan be released in June of this year.
NATIONAL DATA NETWORK— INSTITUTE OF CHILD HEALTH RESEARCH HOSTED NODE
The National Data Network (NDN) is a collaborative project, lead by the ABS, to provide a library of data holdings relevant to policy analysis and research. The Network will consist of the NDN Central node (located at the ABS) linking to NDN Nodes located on servers at individual external data custodians’ servers. A Node is essentially a library of meta-data about each data custodian’s data holdings. These data holdings remain within, and controlled by, the custodian organisations
The Western Australian ABS office is working in collaboration with the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research (ICHR) to create a NDN node which will bring additional datasets to the network. The primary dataset to be accessed via the ICHR node will be the WA Aboriginal Child Health Survey. It is expected that other related datasets will be made available over time.
Professor Fiona Stanley is a strong supporter of this NDN initiative and is keen to expose Indigenous data to the network to complement health data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which are now accessible. A valuable aspect of this NDN project is that it allows partners to share best practice principles, particularly in such critical areas as privacy protocols, and information standards
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