21.K. Workshop: Closing the data gap on child health – approaches, characteristics and methodological challenges
Authors:   Organised by: EUPHA Public health monitoring and reporting section, THL(Finland),   Chair persons: Nicole Rosenkötter - EUPHA-PHMR, Hanna Tolonen - Finland
Published: October 2020

As stated in the 2010 and 2020 Marmot review, inequalities, especially during childhood, have lifelong impacts. Social hardships during childhood reduce the chances for children to develop and flourish and show to have a negative impact on livelong health outcomes.

To monitor progress in reducing inequalities in child health and to inform policy makers and other stakeholders to develop healthy public policies, data on social determinants, health outcomes, health behaviour, the conditions in which children grow up, and the utilisation of health care are needed. But these data have been scarce for routine population health monitoring. Routine data sources like mortality statistics or hospital discharge data have shown to be not very well suited to monitor child health since they are only outcome focussed and cover only extreme events. In this workshop we aim to showcase different national approaches that aim to overcome this data gap. We want to discuss their set-up including the strength and weaknesses in terms of organisation, management, data quality, information richness, and dissemination and we want to learn about the experiences workshop participants made in their countries.

First, we will learn about two approaches that combine questionnaire and examination elements. England has long-standing experiences in monitoring child health and includes children in their general population-based health examination survey, so that children's health can be seen in the context of other household members, in particular parent's socio-economic status, health status, and health-related behaviours. The German approach focusses specifically on child health and includes a module for longitudinal monitoring. Second, we will learn about experiences from Finland who make use of routinely collected data from health check-ups performed at child health clinics and school health care. While the first two approaches use representative population samples, the Finish approach make use of a whole population sample including those who utilise public health services. The third part of this workshop will focus on a specific methodological discussion regarding the identification of children with chronic diseases and the comparison of several measurement approaches.

We will devote twenty minutes for the presentation of the three different data collection approaches in order to gain a good overview on their set-up and their characteristics and 15 minutes for the methodological presentation regarding the measurement of chronic diseases in children. 15 minutes are reserved for further discussion with the workshop participants and the exchange of experiences in child health monitoring worldwide.

Key messages

Register- and survey-based approaches for child health monitoring exist that provide data for routine population health monitoring and inform policy-making. Methodological issues, e.g. in terms of standards or measurement approaches exist and need further research and discussion.