So, you think you don’t serve kids? Think again.

Yes, believe it or not, you work in child health.

“But that’s what GPs and the Children’s Hospital do!” you say?

Yes, but our services at VCH serve a lot of parents. And parent impact on child development is huge. The health and well-being of parents has as high effect on their child’s health as general parenting know-how. For example, sometimes the best intervention strategy for young children with serious behavioural or emotional problems is to focus directly on the primary needs of those who care for them. Yes, it has that big of an impact.

Poor child development means future VCH customers. And we don’t want that. Our business model is about providing quality care, as well as reducing demand for that care. Fewer customers = success! (as long as it’s because we have healthier populations that do not need our services rather than due to access barriers).

Our Senior Executive Team gets it. It’s why they include a measure of child developmental vulnerability (Early Development Index) on our public score card. Currently, 33% of young kids in our region are vulnerable. As a big organization, with parents constantly entering our system, we could have a bigger impact on child health and development.

What can you do?

It could be as simple as being mindful that your clients’ well-being affects people beyond themselves, particularly kids, and that this could have a long-term impact on those children. It may be about improving how you build client capacity to maintain health and wellness so that it also positively impacts (or at least doesn’t negatively impact) their young children. Research shows that for many of the services that VCH offers – for example, Mental Health and Addictions services – these would actually have a higher impact if they routinely included some attention to the needs of the young children of their adult clients.

Watch this animated video

Or start here by watching this short animated video about building adult capabilities to improve child outcomes.

Ask for a Child Impact Assessment of your service

Contact the Regional Population Health Team if you would be interested in a Child Impact Assessment of your program. You may be surprised at how your service impacts kids and what simple changes you could make to help to move the needle on child vulnerability in our health region.