Public interest in child health not matched by government resources

The high priority given to child health issues by the general public has not been mirrored by the allocation of government resources, Dr James Appleyard, chairman of the British Medical Association's working party on child health, told a conference in London last week.

Child health had not featured as a specific target in either the last government's Health of the Nation white paper or the current government's Our Healthier Nation, said Dr Appleyard, a consultant paediatrician at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital.

This was due to both complacency about low childhood mortality and the competing claims of an increasingly ageing population, he added.

The conference, at the Royal College of Physicians, was organised by the BMA to discuss future policies for improving children health. It took as its starting point the report of its working party, which was published earlier this year, Growing up in Britain: Ensuring a Healthy Future for our Children (BMJ Publishing, London).

Reducing socioeconomic inequalities was a key issue for future health strategies, according to the former chief medical officer Sir Donald Acheson, whose report An Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health was published last year. Children were disproportionately affected by poverty, he said, with a third of children (compared with only a quarter of adults) living in households with an income of less than 50% of the national average.

The Acheson report made recommendations for reducing health inequality, many of which concerned children. Specific measures called for by Sir Donald and other speakers at the conference included improved maternal and child nutrition, promotion of breast feeding, better childcare facilities, sex education to reduce teenage pregnancy, accident prevention, and enhancing the role of health visitors.

Clear evidence was presented that improving the nutrition and safety in children from less well off families required structural support rather than just parental education.

The health secretary, Frank Dobson, told the conference that the government was keen to reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy, provide grants for “fireguards and pan guards” to reduce domestic accidents, and improve childcare facilities

He said that school “breakfast clubs” was a way of improving nutrition, although an earlier speaker had pointed out that less than 2% of schools currently operated these.