Rigby, A. S., Sanderson, C., Desforges, M. F., Lindsay, Geoff and Hall, D. M. (1999) The Infant Index : a new outcome measure for pre-school children's services. In: 1st Annual Meeting of the Royal-College-of-Paediatrics-and-Child-Health, York, UK, 15-18 Apr 1997. Published in: Journal of Public Health Medicine, Volume 21 (Number 2). pp. 172-178.

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Abstract

Background The evaluation of community services for preschool children is hampered by the lack of valid and routinely available outcome measures. Th is study examines the use of data collected by teachers in response to educational legislation to determine whether a routine measure of attainments in primary school is sensitive to factors known to affect mental development.

Method A community child health dataset for the cohort of children born in Sheffield in 1990-1991 was matched with a dataset provided by schools in 1995-1996. The educational data consisted of the Infant Index scores which measure education attainments in reception class pupils.

Results We matched 4487 children from both datasets, which represented 75 per cent of all children born in the 1990-1991 cohort. Factors which predicted a poor Infant Index included male gender (odds ratio (OR)= 2.1, 95 per cent confidence interval (CI)= 1.8-2.6), low birthweight (OR = 1.4, 95 per cent Cl = 1.1-1.9) and lack of breast feeding either by intention to feed (OR = 1.3, 95 per cent CI = 1.1-1.7) or actual feeding practice at one month (OR = 1.5, 95 per cent CI = 1.1-2.0). Other factors associated with a poor outcome for the child were postnatal depression, number of pregnancies, ethnicity, pre-school educational experiences and poor housing.

Conclusions Although the results are interesting in themselves, the main significance of our project is in establishing a link between routinely collected health data and routine education data. This could facilitate research in the future thus leading to a considerable saving in the cost of long-term intervention studies.

Item Type:	Conference Item (Paper)
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research (CEDAR)
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Public Health Medicine
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0957-4832
Official Date:	June 1999
Volume:	Volume 21
Number:	Number 2
Number of Pages:	7
Page Range:	pp. 172-178
Identification Number:	10.1093/pubmed/21.2.172
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Conference Paper Type:	Paper
Title of Event:	1st Annual Meeting of the Royal-College-of-Paediatrics-and-Child-Health
Type of Event:	Conference
Location of Event:	York, UK
Date(s) of Event:	15-18 Apr 1997
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/14409

Data sourced from Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge

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