The NSW Ombudsman's biennial report to Parliament contained recommendations directed at Family and Community Services (FACS), NSW Police and NSW Health, based on a review of the deaths of 41 children in 2012 and 2013, and a separate review of 83 children killed in circumstances of family abuse in the decade to 2013.

Western NSW was singled out for its relatively high incidence of family abuse-related child deaths and issues that had affected the provision of child protection.

Children in regional and remote areas accounted for a third of family abuse-related child deaths, the report said, with more than a third of that group (10 of 29) residing in western or far western NSW.

In the decade to 2013, Western NSW was the equal leading location of residence for Aboriginal children whose deaths were reviewable, meaning they had died as a result of abuse or neglect, in suspicious circumstances or while in care or detention.

In an 11-year period, Community Services Centres (CSCs) in western NSW accounted for about a third of more than 40 formal investigations and inquiries conducted arising from child deaths involving FACS' handling of cases, the report found.

The report also said investigations and reviews into the deaths of four Aboriginal children over a two-year period to 2012 identified "ongoing systemic problems in the region".

These included "the recruitment and retention of skilled staff, the quality of child protection practice and inadequate professional supervision and support".

NSW Ombudsman Bruce Barbour said the reviews showed a clear link between fatal abuse of children by family members and perpetrators who were already known to police as serious violent offenders.

He recommended police and child protection staff work together more closely to improve responses to children living with domestic violence, and said there was a need to better and more quickly exchange information from their respective databases.

"The majority - almost 80 per cent - of children who died in abuse-related circumstances over the past decade in NSW were killed or allegedly killed by a family member," he said.

"Over half of the persons of interest in the child's death were birth parents. Notably, intimate partners of birth mothers, particularly new male partners, also featured as persons of interest in one-third of the cases."

In response to concerns raised in the Ombudsman's report, FACS detailed several actions it was taking to address issues in western NSW, including filling extra positions in the district, establishing a mobile child protection unit outreaching to upper western NSW and developing a protocol with Aboriginal communities to achieve better outcomes when placing children in out of home care.

The report suggested while the initiatives were "encouraging", more needed to be done to strengthen the overall service system in western NSW.

The Ombudsman's report follows a discussion paper put forward by the NSW Opposition proposing parents or guardians convicted of a serious violent offence against their own child have any future children automatically removed from them, one of its driving forces being the death of a child who suffered repeated physical abuse at a home near Warren four years ago.

Bailey Constable was killed by his stepfather Nathan Forrest in 2011, when the toddler was four. At trial, the court heard Bailey had told his maternal grandmother Forrest had repeatedly physically abused him and despite her alerting the Department of Community Services (DoCs), no official action was taken.