Paper
Patterns of illness and health service use in families where children go into public care
- issue: Issue 4 / 2009
- authors: Doug Simkiss
- keywords: public care, children, health service
- views: 3015
- downloaded: 0
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abstract
Introduction
This study addresses the hypothesis that families (specifically mother- child pairs) with children taken into public care have different patterns of illness and health service use before the children are removed into care compared to other families.
Description of the work
Using the General Practice Research Database, retrospective primary and secondary health care data has been collected on 370 mother-child pairs (cases) where the child then went into public care at the end of the time period and 1480 control mother-child pairs matched by practice, age and sex of the child.
Clinical exposures of interest in the mother's data set include psychiatric diagnoses, drug and alcohol misuse, sexually transmitted infections, evidence of trauma, specific medication and number and diagnosis of hospital admissions.
Clinical exposures of interest in the child's data set include developmental diagnoses, psychiatric diagnoses, specific disabilities, child maltreatment episodes, prescription of specific medication and number and diagnosis of hospital admissions.
Non clinical exposures of interest include differences in lifestyle patterns of the mother; smoking rates, alcohol consumption, body mass index and immunisation status of the child.
Conditional logistic analysis is being used to estimate the effect on the risk of being looked after of the exposures of interest outlined above. Standard model-building techniques such as forward selection will be used to investigate the combined effect of more than one exposure of interest.
Contact details
Dr Doug Simkiss, Health Sciences Research Institute, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands, CV4 7AL, UK.
Tel: 0044 2476 575289
Fax: 0044 2476 528375
Email: d.e.simkiss@warwick.ac.uk