The impact of socio-economic background in relation to child health care in proportion to need
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Data from registries will be used to combine information on social and economic factors, as well as child health at birth, into a single score reflecting structural vulnerability. Advanced statistical modelling using regional data will be conducted to explore how community health services promote positive outcomes. Relationships between these factors and children's health outcomes will also be examined.
Details
- Funder: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare
Description
Many factors influence children's health and development, including prenatal conditions, the home environment and the child’s neighbourhood. Circumstances both before and at birth influence a child's future health and development.
The child's home environment also has a clear impact on health and development. These include parental lifestyle, well-being, educational attainment, economic status, social vulnerability, exclusion and overcrowding. The child's physical environment can act as both a protective and detrimental factor for the child's health and development.
Publicly funded Swedish paediatric health care reaches 99% of all children. The health services are staffed by specialist nurses and general practitioners who offer regular child health care visits according to a national child health care programme that includes 16 visits. Child health services aim to improve and monitor children's health and development through regular growth and development assessments, vaccinations and parental support.
Child health services are structured to deliver proportionate universalism in a three-tier system:
- The first tier consists of universal interventions targeting the whole population.
- The second tier comprises targeted preventive interventions for children with a presumed increased need or risk of poor health or development.
- The third level includes targeted interventions for children and families with higher needs, who should be offered interventions by, for example, speech therapists, psychologists or social services.
In Sweden, there is no in-depth assessment of the health of children within the child health services on a national level. Nor are there any studies that examine how proportional universalism works in child health care internationally or in Sweden, apart from one study from 2010 based on data from a Swedish region.
In this research project, our starting point is an in-depth analysis of factors affecting children's health and to examine differences in vulnerability and the amount of intervention families receive.
The project will use data from high-quality Swedish registers, covering large study populations from several Swedish regions, to address this knowledge gap.