Child & Youth Toolkit

Child and Youth Health Toolkit
Ensuring access to appropriate child health care services including well child and family health care, and immunisation

Date of publication: November 2004

Executive summary
Publication availability
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Executive summary

Healthy children grow into healthy adults. Good child health is important, therefore, both in its own right and as a contribution to adult health. The effects of poor health in childhood can last a lifetime and explain many of our adult health inequalities. This in turn affects the health of the next generation.

Children are dependent on their family or caregiver for access to services. While differences in health status are the result of a complex interplay of societal, family and service factors, they are largely the result of differences in material resources such as parental income, parental education, parental employment and housing. Differences in access to health care services and in the quality and level of care provided also have a considerable impact on health outcomes.

The vision of the Child Health Strategy is ‘Our children/tamariki: seen, heard, and getting what they need’. This means children need to be loved and nurtured in families that are safe and free from violence, and parents need to be able to access support from their wider whänau and community. Community-based health services can make a real difference to the health of children by ensuring that they:

are enrolled with a primary health care provider and well child provider
receive their immunisations, dental, hearing and vision checks and other well child tamariki ora services on time
have health problems, such as infections, identified and treated early, so that complications are limited and children are able to fulfil their potential.

Good health for all children and a reduction in inequalities among those with poor health status require an analysis of health needs, good advice on how to overcome actual barriers to services, and co-ordinated and systematic effort from the health and other sectors. Achieving this means understanding the following key concepts.

Prenatal, infancy, childhood and adolescence create unique ‘windows of opportunity’ early in the life course to establish strong foundations for lifelong health and wellbeing.
It is better to focus on keeping the whole population of children and young people well and healthy in their families and communities than to focus solely on treating sickness.
Primary health care services and primary health organisations (PHOs) are essential to improving access to health services for the most disadvantaged children and young people.
Reducing inequalities between different groups of children and young people requires comprehensive strategies to tackle both the root causes of health inequalities and how they are mediated.
Those with the greatest need should be prioritised for service.
The actual differences in health status and access to health services need to be understood for different groups of children and young people.

Achieving the actions outlined in these key concepts requires the following infrastructural supports:

high-quality health and disability service providers who are responsive to the diverse health and cultural needs of all population groups
the collection of good-quality service and ethnicity information to measure progress and identify those with higher health need and those who miss out on services
all providers and DHBs having workforce development plans that are prioritised to meet those with the highest health needs.

While each DHB will have its own arrangements and processes, general mechanisms are needed to ensure:

that good advice from communities is obtained about the actual barriers to families accessing health services, and that DHBs then systematically work to reduce the barriers
methods of funding and service prioritisation that give priority to those with the greatest health need
better co-ordination of health provider effort through working or advisory groups that have representatives from funders and planners, community providers, primary health care, secondary care, allied health providers and public health to advise on health need and priorities.

The vision, future directions and population approach of the Primary Health Care Strategy, implemented through PHOs is the main way to see improved access to services for children and young people.

Publication availability

The toolkit is only available on this website in Word & PDF

Child and Youth Health Toolkit (Word, 861 KB)

Child and Youth Health Toolkit (PDF, 957 KB)

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Publishing information

Date of publication: November 2004

ISBN 0-478-25763-5 (Internet)