One of the initiatives to be launched as a result of the Budget is the Better Health Channel, which will incorporate information for consumers about health conditions, healthy living, life events, support and advice as well as the Department’s guide to local health services.

Further funding of $1.1 million will expand the Channel to:

• Incorporate appropriate forms and transactions targeted at the community.
• Establish strategic partnerships with healthy promotion organisations and other "authoritative" service providers.
• Establish links with funded agency Internet sites.

The website will feature about 100 pages of reliable, authoritative information about health conditions and healthy living. Each page has links to a vast array of other online health information compiled by health groups and services, and more are being added all the time.

The site has been written in eight community languages to help overcome the language barrier. The eight are: Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Italian, Macedonian (Slavonic), Polish, Spanish and Turkish.

The Channel is to be piloted in waiting rooms in selected hospitals, community health centres and other high-traffic health centres.

Special features of the site include a "topic of the month" presented by a guest expert and offering a moderated question-and-answer forum for the community, an online calendar of health and well-being events, and a choice of postcards to send to friends on the Internet.

Other funding initiatives in the Department of Human Services include:

• $4.9 million in recurrent funding for the expansion of child protection and placement services.
• Additional recurrent funding of $3 million in an expansion of public dental services.
• Additional State recurrent funding of up to $5.7 million (including $0.7 million from internal re-allocation) for Home and Community Care (HACC) program services.
• Additional recurrent funding of $500,000 to cover a growing demand for community health services.
• Additional funding of $5.8 million to cover the growth in demand for Juvenile Justice Custodial Services for the 17–20-year-old age group.