| Innhold: | Childhood and adolescence are crucial in shaping long-term health, development and well-being.
Interventions in early childhood and health promotion tackle risk factors and their long-term negative impacts but countries do not invest enough in prevention.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds have higher unmet needs and worse health outcomes but also face the most difficulties accessing health and social care services.
Multiple barriers stop vulnerable children and adolescents accessing support, including costs, administrative complexity, the fragmented links between sectors, language and health literacy.
Targeted interventions are key in addressing disparities and in reaching among others migrants, refugees and those from disrupted family environments.
Policy-makers can improve health promotion and preventive services for children and adolescents through three key pathways:
Strategic collaboration across health, social and educational sectors is vital in tackling the underlying determinants of health which cannot be addressed by one sector alone.
Encouraging bottom-up approaches fosters effective innovation.
Combining bottom-up approaches with top-down government support helps ensure the resources to implement, scale up and sustain successful programmes.
Developing robust data collection and the infrastructure to share data facilitates work across sectors.
Building systems that collect and share high-quality information enables collaboration between healthcare, social services and education.
Systematically integrating data and programme evaluations helps highlight what works or doesn’t work and the policy responses needed.
Supporting targeted interventions with tailored outreach initiatives can overcome access barriers.
Communication campaigns, engaging a mix of stakeholders and expanding school health service can reach vulnerable children and adolescents.
Introducing navigators or coordinators to guide families through service options helps vulnerable children and adolescents get support.
Linking parent and child healthcare fosters holistic and better integrated care. |