Elders in Alice Springs are selecting children aged under 10 to train them up to be so-called "child doctors".

Children will learn more about basic health and hygiene in the training sessions.

The project's coordinators say a similar scheme in Indonesia helped prevent an outbreak of cholera after the 2004 tsunami.

Up to 91 per cent of Indigenous children in northern and central Australia contract ear infections that can lead to deafness and a quarter risk blindness through trachoma.

To try to reduce these statistics, the Malpa Project is setting out to train child doctors.

The project's chief executive Don Palmer says the approach is particularly resonant in Aboriginal communities in Central Australia

"The Ngangkari, the traditional healers, select young people who seem to have the attitude or aptitude of caring for others," he said.

"They select them and then they begin to transfer the healing skills and the knowledge to the children, so that they learn and take responsibility for those things.

"What we're doing is working with the Ngangkari and with the elders and respecting those traditional medicines and ways of doing it, but with Western clinicians also in selecting young people, giving them basic primary health skills, particularly which are very, very important."

A tribal elder is selecting which children, aged between eight and 10, will participate.

"The word doctor suggests fairly elevated skills but it is not going to be like this," Mr Palmer said.

"The really basic hygiene things that are going to make the most difference. Simple things like wiping your nose, wearing shoes, washing your hands.

"Those really, really basic things that are going to make a major impact on things like otitis media and trachoma and all those things that are the start of what is called syndrome x where the kids get these things at an early age and their poor little bodies don't get a chance to grow really strong.

"So...when more difficult things assail them later in life, they are often not well equipped to be dealing with them."

But some of these children are living in homes with little running water or electricity, clean clothes or clean sheets.

Mr Palmer says these disadvantages are going to be addressed.

"This has got to be about the community taking responsibility and ownership of these things for themselves and when children take responsibility for things, it becomes a conversation so I think it will become part of the conversation of the family and of the various groups in the camps and in the communities," he said.

Rural Doctors Association President Paul Mara says the idea has a lot of potential.

"Anything that increases communication with people in Indigenous communities and shows that people are working together should be a good thing," he said.

"I'd be interested to see how it pans out, but I think it's an innovative idea."