One day, while Ms Terry had Saraya at work with her at RivMed, a person from Aboriginal health program SEARCH (Study of Environment on Aboriginal Resilience and Child Health) came in and noticed the five-year-old had all the signs of a middle-ear infection.

“I had a feeling something was wrong and it confirmed I wasn’t crazy,” Ms Terry said.

“I knew something was up from when she was born and if I wasn’t working (at RivMed) I don’t think it would have been picked up so quickly.”

SEARCH is a long-term study into urban Aboriginal childrens’ health run by the Sax Institute in conjunction with organisations like RivMed. It aims to understand the origins of common problems, which will enable researchers to get a complete picture of how to close the health gap.

The results meant RivMed had successfully lobbied for increased speech pathology services, which were of great benefit to Saraya.

“She had a mild hearing loss, a slight lisp and couldn’t pronounce some words properly,” Ms Terry said.

“We went to a speech therapist at Kurrajong Early Intervention Service and they worked with Saraya one-on-one in a quiet room, gave me the tools to take home to work with her and now her lisp is gone.”

RivMed chief Darren Carr said there were relatively high rates of hearing impairment among Aboriginal children in Wagga, which had a big impact on education.

“If they can’t hear properly they can lose their confidence and it can follow them throughout their life,” Mr Carr said.

“Research shows about 90 per cent of Aboriginal people in prison have hearing loss and there’s a very strong association between hearing and bad outcomes.

“These kids might get labelled as ‘naughty’ when they simply can’t hear instructions.”

Saraya is now on the waiting list for a simple surgical procedure that will permanently fix the problem.

“I guarantee she’ll do better at school,” Ms Terry said.

“There’s a lot of kids out there who might share the problem, I really think their parents need to call us and get involved.”