Australia falling behind in emergency preparedness for children

Red Cross emergency services volunteer Pam Halnon found a mother struggling to sanitise baby bottles with cold tap water in the shared bathrooms of a Mallacoota bushfire evacuation centre.

The mother said she could not see any other option given the situation, despite the significant risk of bacterial infection.

It made me realise that this isn't a good thing, Ms Halnon said.

As a mother and a grandmother, I knew it was just gastro waiting to happen, and that was just not something we needed at that point in time. This issue is not limited to the devastating Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20.

Ms Halnon said scenarios like this were common across Australia, and research highlighted a shortfall in emergency preparedness and planning for parents with young children.

In 2013 a Save the Children Australia audit concluded that children suffered from benign neglect in emergency planning, with their needs not routinely and systematically considered.

There was also insufficient infrastructure at evacuation centres, and information aimed at parents was also lacking, according to Ms Hanlon.

She said there was information on how to care for your dog information on tank water information about asbestos, but none of it was geared towards families with young children.

Western Sydney University School of Nursing and Midwifery adjunct associate professor Karleen Gribble said Australia was falling behind.

She said I'd do my own audit and I'm able to look at all our state and territory and our national plans and guidance and show that we really don't have planning for children.

We've done a lot better planning for animals than what we do for kids. A 2019 study conducted by Dr Gribble showed that animals were used on more than 2,300 occasions in the national, state, and territory planning and guidance, while the words infant, infants, baby, and babies were used 124 times.

Australia had agreed to international plans that required sufficient emergency planning for infants and young children, as a member of the World Health Assembly.

In 2010 the World Health Assembly voted to endorse a set of planning and said countries needed to develop planning along the lines of this guidance.

Emergency preparedness planning for young children was overlooked because of two factors - that children were already considered vulnerable and were the responsibility of their parents, and that emergency services were predominantly run by men, according to Dr Gribble.

It's assumed that parents will look after their children, but there is not an understanding that they might need some help, she said.

The second issue is that the emergency space is really male-dominated and I think that's having an impact. The data collected by Dr Gribble is used to outline the flaws in Australia's emergency response planning, surveying parents who have experienced these situations firsthand to create an improved model.

Myself and others in the last few years have been pushing the government to do something about this, and earlier in the year the Australian Breastfeeding Association put in a grant application to the federal government to get some money to do some work around this, she said.

We've had a lot of valuable information come through.

A lot of people said they evacuated when they wouldn't have done because they had young children, but also people saying they delayed evacuation because they had young children, because it was overwhelming to think about all of the things they'd have to pack for their child.