This education resource was originally produced for maternal and child health nurses in Victoria by the Department of Dermatology at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne together with the Skin Health Institute in 2002. That folder is still relied on in many of those clinics and has been valued by those nurses.
For many years, the Skin Health Institute and its member dermatologists had been wanting to refresh and update the information and, importantly, extend its availability to a wider audience across the nation, including maternal & child health nurses, pharmacists, GPs and those other healthcare professionals working in maternity wards or advising new mothers.
After winning a grant to fund the project, the Institute assembled a team of dermatologists to review and update the information. These dermatologists have sub-specialty interests in neonatal skin health, in the specific skin conditions addressed, and the common skin conditions experienced by mothers. They have been able to bring new life to the former work of St Vincent’s Hospital. We owe them all a great deal of gratitude. All those authors are acknowledged in the Contributors section of this Resource.
We would also like to acknowledge the advice and support provided by maternal & child health and other healthcare professionals, particularly Marcia Armstrong, the Principal Maternal and Child Health Nurse Advisor for the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr Joey Calandra from the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, Ms Kim Howland, the Maternal and Child Health Nurse Policy Advisor for the Municipal Association of Victoria, Dr Katherine Allnutt, Professor Amanda Oakley (New Zealand), Associate Professor Chris Baker, Associate Professor Peter Foley and Associate Professor Alvin Chong.
The Resource would not have happened without the considerable input by Chris Arnold, former Executive Director and Peter Monaghan, Director, Corporate Affairs at the Skin Health Institute. For several years they have been seeking ways to make this happen, and have been instrumental in driving the process forward from inception to fruition. They have brought together the funding, the Steering Committee and the large team of specialist consultants, web designers and developers, interns and professors and driven the whole process to completion.
The Institute hopes all healthcare professionals using these resources find them useful when helping mothers and their infants.
Photography
Many of the images displayed on this Maternal & Child Skin Health website have been sourced from DermNet NZ. These can be identified by the DermNet watermark. All of those image are copyright and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (New Zealand).
We sincerely thank Professor Amanda Oakley, the Founder and Chief Editor of DermNet, for her support in allowing these images to be used in this way.
This resource has been developed and produced by the Skin Health Institute in Melbourne, with the financial support of a grant from Johnson & Johnson Pacific.