Nursery staff set to monitor child health
Lindsay Clark
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Nurseries and early years professionals will be expected to play a greater role in monitoring childrens health under new proposals from the Scottish Executive.
The consultation document, Health for All Children, suggests that health checks at the ages of eight months, two years and 39 months for conditions such as autism or co-ordination problems should be abandoned, because the services were under-used.
The consultation proposes that instead, the NHS provide a public health nurse for each pre-school setting and that child health services should make "more use of the skills of other professionals working with children such as pre-school childcare workers, to promote healthy living messages and observe child development.
The Executive has based its consultation on a report published last February by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The reports author, Professor David Hall, former president of the college, said spot checks by clinicians on childrens health were of limited value because those who would most benefit from them were least likely to attend appointments.
He also argued that people who worked with children on a day-to-day basis were well positioned to pick up any developmental problems early.
"Early years professionals, nursery nurses and Sure Start workers are the people who observe children every day, he said. "They may or may not be highly trained in child development, but as they often work with the same age groups for a whole year, they get a good idea of what is normal child development. For a modest extra investment we could introduce those people to what they can look out for at an early stage.
Professor Hall said that early years practitioners could be trained to monitor the health of young children by attending a two- or three-day course, or an equivalent. He added that this was "not to make them expert paediatricians, but to capture what they already know and to sharpen their observational skills.
However, a spokesman for the Scottish Executive could not say whether nursery staff would get extra training to perform this proposed role. He said, "It is not really about giving extra training or extra tasks to childrens workers, its about giving extra support so they can look out for problems with children.
If anybody, aside from the parents, is going to see a child is ill, then it will be the early years staff.
But Carol Ball, chair of Unisons nursery nurses working party, said many childcare workers already performed these functions, and that they often ran programmes on healthy eating and encouraged children to get more exercise with outdoor play. She stressed that nursery workers also had a role to play in monitoring child development, because "a lot of conditions manifest themselves in the early years, so we have a diagnostic role to play in terms of spotting differences that children have at an early age.
Ms Ball added that early years practitioners deserved recognition for their work in childrens health. "We are not medical professionals - thats not our role - but we have expertise in child development that can be useful. If they want us to formally do this role, linking with health services, then there should be recognition for it.
Responses to the consultation should be sent to the Women and Childrens Unit, St Andrews House, Regent Road, Edinburgh EH1 3DG or by e-mail to womenandchild.unit@scotland.gsi.gov.uk . The consultation ends on 31 March.