EUPHA section on Child and adolescent public health

President
Dr P.Auke Wiegersma, MD PhD MPH
Department of Health Sciences, Social Medicine
University Medical Center Groningen
A.Deusinglaan 1
9713 AV Groningen
The Netherlands
tel.: +31 50 3636850
fax: +31 50 3632860
email: p.a.wiegersma@med.umcg.nl

In December 2001 the Governing Council of the EUPHA gave its approval to the founding of the Section on Child and Adolescent Public Health (then called Section on Youth). The section currently has 290 members. At the annual EUPHA conferences workshops and pre-conferences on several topics are organised, often in collaboration with other sections, and/or other organisations. Furthermore, the president is involved in the preparations of each EUPHA conference, co-chairs several parallel meetings at the conference and organises an annual meeting. Also, after each conference a section report is drawn up, which is used in the yearly conference book. 

Aim of the Section
The aim of the Section, is to bring together (health) care professionals that work with younger age groups - (youth) welfare workers, psychologists, educational scientists, (youth) health care professionals, but also paediatricians, psychiatrists, etc.. Together they are to add to the knowledge base regarding effective ways to influence health using collective approaches and irrespective of 'finding place'. This way youngsters that dropped out, skipped education, already have jobs or otherwise can not be reached through institutions for primary, secondary or tertiary education will also be included in these efforts. Studies are to be initiated on an international level to compare different techniques and interventions aimed at improving health, thus promoting evidence-based community medicine. Also, the way primary youth (health) care systems are organised are to be surveyed and used for international comparative research.

In short, for the 0 - 24 year age group, this Section is to:

Background information
The ideas about inventorying youth health care systems internationally originates from our former EUPHA president Marc Brodin. During a council meeting where the new section CAPH was to be endorsed, he pointed out that on a European scale, there is relatively very little known about health, health-related behaviour and relevant preventive interventions for youth in the 4 - 12 year age bracket. This seems to be caused by the fact that pertinent information about this age group can often only be obtained via their parents, making data harder to acquire and less reliable than for instance letting children complete surveys in the classroom. Nevertheless, theory suggests that at this age and earlier, the foundation is laid for later health-related and health-compromising behaviour, making it all-important to focus preventive efforts on this younger age group.

However, for this it is vital to obtain information about the way these children can be positively influenced, given information in a way that is easily understood and even internalised and what preventive interventions could be successful. In this, commerce is 'light-years' ahead of us when it comes to understanding - and exploiting this understanding of - the child's mind. Much can be learned from them, for instance in the use of focus groups, analysing the way children speak about certain subjects and translating that in new approaches to entice them into buying their products, et cetera. These techniques, and many others from other, often unexpected sources can certainly be used by youth health care as well and one of the tasks of section CAPH would be to identify promising approaches and translating them into successful public health interventions. Furthermore, present-day visualisation techniques of the brain have given us new insights in the way especially the developing (adolescent) brain functions, that should result in completely different approaches to  health promotion. Although these insights have been around for more than a decade, implementation is still a long way off. For that reason, section CAPH promotes and organises (EuTeach) training courses on adolescence care and health.

A second source of inspiration is the pioneering work of Aidan Macfarlane, who was our keynote speaker at the workshop in Dresden in 2002 and has regularly visited and contributed to our section in the years thereafter. He has created youth oriented websites (www.teenagehealthfreak.org and www.youthhealthtalk.org), that have grown into a national interactive online vade mecum for children, parents and teachers alike, with more than 400.000 hits a week. Not only that, but by collating the data from the questions asked he can foresee trends, and identify areas of interest or concern for public health that otherwise would go unnoticed.