Child and adolescent public health -> Background information

This section was established in December 2001 in Brussels. It was first called the EUPHA section Youth, which was changed in 2004 to the EUPHA section on Child and Adolescent public health (CAPH).

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.
 

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