Related Experiment Videos
Health service consumption and parent reported episodes of illness in children 0-3 years
D Bruusgaard1, S A Kise, D Nilsson
1Department of General Practice University of Oslo, Norway.
Insights
This study tracked children's healthcare use for four years, finding that common factors like parental education or allergies couldn't predict health service consumption. Children had an average of 10.6 general practitioner contacts and 1.9 hospital contacts.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Health Services Research
- Public Health Policy
- Healthcare Utilization Studies
Background:
- Understanding healthcare consumption patterns in early childhood is crucial for resource allocation and public health planning.
- Previous research has explored various factors influencing pediatric healthcare utilization, but comprehensive predictive models remain elusive.
Purpose of the Study:
- To characterize health service utilization among children during their first four years of life.
- To investigate the predictive power of several potential explanatory variables on the frequency of healthcare contacts in children.
Main Methods:
- A prospective cohort study followed 183 children from birth to four years in a southern Norwegian municipality.
- Health service encounters were documented through general practitioner (GP) billing records, hospital admission files, and parental reports of illness episodes via postal questionnaires.
Main Results:
- Children averaged 10.6 GP contacts (2.6 annually) and 1.9 hospital contacts (including outpatient visits) over four years, with contact frequency decreasing with age.
- Reported illness episodes averaged 11.5 per child, with higher rates in the first year.
- Factors such as sex, breastfeeding duration, family smoking, allergy history, parental education, kindergarten attendance, and psychosocial issues did not predict healthcare consumption.
Conclusions:
- The observed lower general practitioner (GP) contact rates may be partly attributed to concurrent use of well-baby clinics.
- This study found that tested explanatory factors were insufficient for predicting health service consumption in young children.
Objective:
To describe health service consumption and to find out whether a series of possible explanatory variables can help us to predict the number of contacts among children.
Design:
A prospective study following a cohort of children during the first four years of life.
Setting:
A municipality in southern Norway.
Participants:
183 children born in the community from October 1979 to and including December 1980.
Main Outcome Measure:
Direct and indirect encounters with general practitioners (GPs) from the bills to the national insurance office, outpatient encounters and hospital admissions from the hospital files, and episodes of illness as reported in postal questionnaires to the parents.
Results:
Each child had on average 10.6 GP contacts (2.6 per year), and the frequency of contacts decreased as they grew. Telephone contacts were almost as frequent as consultations at the doctor's surgery, and the doctors made more home visits to the youngest children. Of the contacts, 4/5 took place in the day time, but most of the home visits took place during the evening/night/weekend. Each child had 1.9 hospital contacts in 4 years, i.e. 0.3 admissions and 1.6 outpatient department contacts. The parents reported an average of 11.5 episodes of illness during the period, more than twice as many in the first year as in the last year. Information about sex, duration of breast feeding, smoking in the family, family history of allergy, parents' education, whether in kindergarten, and presence of psychosocial problems cannot help in predicting health care consumption.
Conclusion:
The low number of contacts with GPs can partly be explained by the fact that the children also have contact with a well-baby clinic. In our study, a series of possible explanatory factors did not help us to predict the amount of health care consumption during the first four years of life.