Promoting and protecting the health of children and young people.

BACKGROUND: The health-related behaviours adopted by children and young people can have both immediate and long-term health effects. Health promotion interventions that target children and young people can lay the foundations of a healthy lifestyle that may be sustained into adulthood. This paper is based on a selective review of evidence relating to health promotion in childhood, carried out to support the external working group on the 'Healthy Child' module of the Children's National Service Framework.
METHODS: This is a selective review of mainly secondary research. It focuses on injury prevention, support for parenting and the promotion of good mental health, and promoting a healthy diet and physical activity amongst children and young people.
FINDINGS: In many areas, the quality of primary research into health promotion interventions aimed at children and young people is poor. Interventions are heterogeneous and not described in sufficient detail. Sample sizes tend to be small, and there are commonly problems of bias. Despite these difficulties, there is good evidence for a range of interventions, including (1) area road safety schemes; (2) combining a variety of approaches to the promotion of the use of safety equipment, including legislation and enforcement, loan/assisted purchase/giveaway schemes, education, fitting and maintenance of safety equipment; (3) school-based mental health promotion; (4) parenting support; (5) interventions that promote and facilitate 'lifestyle' activity for children, such as walking and cycling to school, and those that aim to reduce sedentary behaviours such as parent education to reduce the time children spend watching TV and using computers; and (6) controlling advertising of unhealthy food that is aimed at children.
CONCLUSIONS: There are effective interventions to promote and protect the health of children and young people that require action across the five areas described in the Ottawa Charter. Health, social care and education services have a direct role in the delivery of many of these interventions and, in other areas, a role in collaborative work with other agencies, in lobbying for policy change and in raising the profile of child health promotion. Further research is needed using larger study populations, and closely defined interventions, both targeted and universal, in order to fill some of the current gaps in the evidence base for health promotion in children and young people.