Paediatric Epidemiology and Community Health: Future Plans
The growing recognition within paediatric circles of the importance of a population perspective on child health is perceptibly changing attitudes within the specialty. Within public health, the debate surrounding the Barker (“fetal programming”) hypothesis is gradually giving way to an acceptance of the need for a life course approach to disease prevention and health promotion. The 1999 Scottish Office White Paper Towards a Healthier Scotland, the subsequent Scottish Executive document Improving Health in Scotland – the Challenge (2003), the Early Years Framework (2008) and numerous other policy statements have emphasised the importance of child health in the context of the Government’s agenda for tackling social exclusion and reducing health inequalities. The Scottish Government has highlighted the importance of children in public health policy and continues to promote an environmental health strategy (Good Places, Better Health), launched in 2008, that highlights children. These developments all point to a greatly enhanced role for the PEACH Unit in the future.
The Unit forms a central pillar of the evolving plans to create a new research and educational centre at Yorkhill at its planned new site at the Southern General Hospital. The proposed centre should provide an ideal multidisciplinary setting for the PEACH Unit.
In the next few years, the research portfolio of the PEACH Unit will continue to focus on the investigation of seven key areas, namely:
- Mortality in childhood
- Congenital anomaliesInjuries in childhood and adolescence
- Infant feeding behaviour and later growth and adiposity
- Assessment of growth and nutritional status in childhood
- Inequalities in child health
- Clinical trials of complex interventions to improve health and well-being of children and their parents
In each of these areas, we will undertake research - in collaboration with colleagues at home and abroad, on three levels: epidemiological, development of preventive interventions, and evaluation.
The PEACH Unit is now recognised as one of the most outstanding academic centres of paediatric public health in Europe. To this end, we will continue to pursue our currently successful strategy of generating substantial external grant income to enable us to recruit talented researchers from a variety of disciplines. The Unit is therefore well placed to grow still further in the coming years and to recruit and train talented young researchers from a variety of disciplines including public health medicine, paediatrics, nursing, epidemiology, biostatistics, health economics, psychology and sociology.
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