Two communities in Western Australia are reeling after the suicides of two Indigenous girls who died within a day of each other.

A 12-year-old Aboriginal girl took her life in the Pilbara mining town of Port Hedland on Sunday, and a 14-year-old Aboriginal girl from the remote community of Warmun in the East Kimberley took her own life on Monday.

Workers from the National Indigenous Critical Response project are in contact with both families.

The deaths come as the state is still waiting on the final report from a sweeping inquest into 13 suicides of Indigenous young people in the Kimberley region from 2012 to 2016, including the shocking death of a 10-year-old girl.

State coroner Ros Fogliani, who began the inquest in 2017, is expected to deliver her findings early this year.

National Indigenous Critical Response project coordinator Gerry Georgatos said the number of Indigenous suicides in the Kimberley had fallen from an annual high of 14 to eight in 2018, but said that the number of suicides or suicide attempts by children was on the rise.

Georgatos said children made up seven of the past nine Indigenous people to take their own life in the Kimberley, and called for an urgent need to overhaul suicide prevention to look at “the full spectrum of issues that led to it”, including child sexual abuse.

He said the focus should be on early intervention.

A Senate inquiry in December found that mental health services in rural and remote areas were lacking and often not culturally appropriate.

It also found that suicides of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were often linked not to mental health but to “despair caused by the history of dispossession combined with the social and economic conditions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples live”.

Indigenous children aged five to 17 die from suicide at five times the rate of non-Indigenous children, according to figures produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this year.

In the five years from 2013 to 2017, the Indigenous child suicide rate was 10.1 per 100,000, compared with two per 100,000 for non-Indigenous children. More than one in four people who took their own life before turning 18 were Indigenous.

Rates are even higher in remote areas of Western Australian and the Northern Territory.