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Commonwealth Fund:
Undetected childhood behavioral health and developmental problems have a significant impact not only on the children who experience them, but also on their families and communities and the medical, mental health, and educational systems they use.
Developmental Surveillance Developmental surveillance, unlike developmental screening, is a flexible, continuous process in which knowledgeable professionals perform observations of children while providing care.
Pioneered in Great Britain, developmental surveillance is broader in scope than screening and other traditional techniques and encompasses all activities relating to the detection of developmental problems.
Components of developmental surveillance include eliciting and attending to parental concerns about a child's behavior, learning, or development; obtaining a developmental history; observation of a child's development; and communicating with others in the child's life (such as childcare providers or preschool teachers).
Because research has shown that parental concerns are important indicators of problems, soliciting parents' input is critical to the developmental surveillance approach.
The Help Me Grow program includes outreach to child health providers on developmental surveillance as well as referral of at-risk children.
Through the support of The Commonwealth Fund, Help Me Grow visited and trained more than 50 percent of the community-based practices in Connecticut---300 practices in all.
Posted on February 8, 2007 08:22 PM
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