Making Data CountManchester 3/11/08

Health and the 5 Outcomes

Enjoying and Achieving

Healthy and Safe

Economic Wellbeing and Positive Contribution

‘A key theme that emerges from this review is the need to ‘follow the child’. For too long professional roles and organisational boundaries have dictated where services are provided rather than where vulnerable children and young people are.

‘Following the child’ is the principle to govern the location of nursing, midwifery and health visiting services. This means being as close to home as possible, in schools, communities, in surgeries, in Connexions, Sure Start programmes and

children’s centres, youth justice services and prisons’. (CNO Review, p26)

So what gets in the way – and what can we do about it?

◦ One issue is accuracy of data – what does it tell us, what do we want it to tell us? (Some interesting research from North Carolina)

◦ Next is timeliness (elected members and the Prime Directive)

◦ And what about access – who gets hold of the data (and what for?)

◦ This leads to a question of engagement (which also implies trust and partnership)

◦ National and/or Local (for example teenage pregnancy and childhood obesity)

◦ Integration (goes back to the rainforest – for example birth data and Bookstart)

Cambridgeshire and Fenland Primary Care Trust : Electronic Health Needs Assessment Tool

The primary benefit of systematic early health needs assessment is that those children and families who have additional health needs, receive appropriate, timely and effective support. Using an electronic system more easily creates an audit trail and baseline data for identifying gaps in service provision, and areas with health inequalities; planning services and monitoring improvements in health over time . It assists health visiting teams and midwives to identify a new family’s additional needs early and refer them for support.

Assessments are offered between 24 – 32 weeks of pregnancy, 8 – 12 months after the birth of the child and again at 2 – 2½ years. If any support needs are identified a review is offered 9 months after the initial health needs assessment.

Health visitors and midwives use laptops which have password security and encryption and the data is subject to Caldicott requirements and a data sharing agreement. Clients give written consent for sharing of anonymised data. A server is used to house the database, which is secure, the laptops are populated with the data by the user on a weekly basis and the data returned to the server at the next upload.