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Identified health concerns and changes in management resulting from the Healthy Kids Check in two Queensland
Rae Thomas1, Jennifer A Doust2, Kartik Vasan2
1Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia. rthomas@bond.edu.au.
Insights
The Healthy Kids Check (HKC) identified health problems in some children, leading to management changes in 3-11% of cases. General practitioners effectively manage child health concerns detected during HKC appointments.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Health
- General Practice
- Preventive Care
Background:
- The Healthy Kids Check (HKC) is a key preventive health service for children.
- Assessing the impact of the HKC on clinical management is crucial for understanding its effectiveness.
Purpose of the Study:
- To quantify child health problems identified by the HKC.
- To determine if these identified problems led to changes in clinical management.
Main Methods:
- A medical records audit was conducted across two Queensland general practices.
- 557 child records from January 2010 to May 2013 who underwent an HKC were analyzed.
- Child health issues were documented pre-, during-, and post-HKC.
Main Results:
- 56% of children had no detected health problems in their records.
- 21% had issues identified during the HKC, most commonly speech/language (20%), toileting, hearing, vision (15% each), and behavioral problems (9%).
- Confirmed problems during HKC led to management changes in 3% of the total sample, estimated between 3-11%.
Conclusions:
- General practitioners demonstrate diligence in identifying and managing pediatric health issues.
- The HKC facilitated the detection of some health problems, prompting clinical management changes.
- Further research is needed to fully ascertain the benefits, harms, false negatives, and true positives of the HKC.
Objectives:
To determine how many children had health problems identified by the Healthy Kids Check (HKC) and whether this resulted in changes to clinical management.
Design, Setting And Participants:
A medical records audit from two Queensland general practices, identifying 557 files of children who undertook an HKC between January 2010 and May 2013.
Main Outcome Measures:
Child health problems identified in the medical records before, during and after the HKC.
Results:
Most children in our sample had no problems detected in their medical record (56%), 21% had problems detected during the HKC assessment, 19% had problems detected before, and 4% after. Most frequent health concerns detected during the HKC were speech and language (20%), toileting, hearing and vision (15% each), and behavioural problems (9%). Of the 116 children with problems detected during the HKC, 19 (3% of the total sample) had these confirmed, which resulted in a change of management. No further action was recorded for 9% of children. Missing data from reviews or referral outcomes for 8% precluded analyses of these outcomes. We estimated that the change in clinical management to children with health concerns directly relating to the HKC ranged between 3% and 11%.
Conclusions:
Overall, data suggest that general practitioners are diligent in detecting and managing child health problems. Some of these problems were detected only during the HKC appointment, resulting in change of management for some children. Further studies are required to estimate the full benefits and harms, and particularly the false negatives and true positives, of the HKC.
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