Research area: Population Health > Policy and Equity

What is Healthier Wealthier Families?

Healthier Wealthier Families is a collaboration that aims to improve the health and wellbeing of families with young children by reducing financial hardship.

We work with community-based health services to support families experiencing financial hardship, by connecting them with financial wellbeing services in their community. 

The financial security of families is central to children’s wellbeing. It helps families to access safe and healthy housing, nutritious food, healthcare and education, and enables children to grow up in environments with less financial stress. 

Unfortunately, at least 1 in 6 children in Australia live in poverty and 1 in 3 experience deprivation due to financial hardship, missing out on:

• proper nutrition
• housing stability
• supportive personal relationships

Poverty can harm children’s future health, learning, economic productivity and participation in society. Without help, poverty can persist across generations.

Successes & next steps

Our collaborative, service systems approach to reducing poverty and inequity aims to help our whole society be healthier and wealthier. We’ve shown that our model is feasible, acceptable and beneficial in a pilot study, which is adapted from a successful model used in Glasgow, Scotland.

Our next steps are to deliver the benefits to more communities and understand the cost-benefits of the model in Australia.

About the pilot study

A successful Healthier Wealthier Families pilot study from 2019-2022 revealed that the approach:

• reduced family stress
• improved financial knowledge
• improved mental health
• increased annual income by an average of $6,504 from benefits that the family was otherwise missing.

Symposium

Our team presented at the International Congress of Evidence-based Parenting Support (I-CEPS) 2023 symposium, 'The road to equity needs to be paved with more than good intentions: Using research to advance the equity agenda'.

Visit the I-CEPS website to view the presentation and other recordings.

Partners & funders

Healthier Wealthier Families is led by the Centre for Community Child Health, at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and The Royal Children’s Hospital.

Contact us

Anna Price
Healthier Wealthier Families Lead and Principle Investigator
Email: show email address

Lead researchers