Developmental Pathways

This unique and important project was proposed in 2003 and received funding in 2005, 2006 and 2007 through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant scheme.  The collaboration between Telethon Institute for Child Health and Crime Research Centre and five government jurisdictions in Western Australia (the Departments of Health, Education and Training, Community Development, Corrective Services and Disability Services Commission) was the first of its kind in Australia has re-defined the meaning of "collaboration".

Information for the project has been assembled from WA's population health databases and complementary information held by the Departments of Education and Training (numeracy and literacy), Justice (juvenile delinquency and offending) and Community Development (child protection) and intellectual disability data.  The linkages between these data sources have been made using best practice privacy preserving protocols.

There has been wide spread support for the project from within each of the participating state agencies.   It is acknowledged that the linkage process has not only provided valuable cross agency data for analyses of important topics concerning children and youth, but has also contributed to the quality of each of the contributing data sources.

All the historic linkages across more than 20 years for the five state agencies will be in place by July 2008.   These include links between health records combined with more than 500,000 numeracy and literacy records, 300,000 community and child protection clients and 100,000 offender records.