Plunket contacts in the first year of life

In New Zealand, routine infant health surveillance is carried out by the nurses of the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society. The full scheduled number of contacts for the first year of life was 15. The pattern of these nurse contacts was examined during the first year of life for babies born between 1979 to 1984. Data was available for 492 randomly selected infants. There was no record of any Plunket contact in 102 (20.7%). Of those infants who had some Plunket contact, only 71 (19.4%) had the full number of contacts or more, and 51 (13.9%) had only seven or fewer contacts. Infants with a high Christchurch-Invercargill-Dunedin (CID) birthscore were more likely not to have any contacts, and when contact was made these infants were seen less often than compared to the low risk group, during this period. More stringent efforts are needed to engage those infants who are at present not being seen, as they appear to be the infants who are most at risk.