Healthy Child Programme

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The Children Act 2004, as amended by the Children and Social Work Act 2017, places duties on key agencies in a local area. Specifically, the police, clinical commissioning groups and the local authority are under a duty to make arrangements to work together, and with other partners locally, to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children in their area. The Healthy Child Programme achieves this through services for health visiting, school nursing, oral health promotion, healthy weight nurses and breastfeeding peer support services.

Health Visiting – deliver child health surveillance, health promotion, health protection and health improvement to the 0 – 5 population and their families in homes and clinic or Children Centres. As part of this work, data on new births shared by the NHS is passed on to Children Centres, that will contact new parents to offer services and support.

School Nursing - review children’s health and development at key stages for children 5 – 19 who attend a Barnet maintained school, Free and Academy schools as well as those being educated at home.

Oral Health - Promotors ensure oral health key messages for young children are widely known by training professionals about oral health in schools, children centres or public venues.

Healthy Weight Nurses - The service carries out height and weight screening as part of the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) [link National child measurement programme: operational guidance - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)] in Year 6 and Reception year. This is a crucial programme for monitoring the progress in tackling childhood obesity in children aged four to five years and ten to 11 years. We collect this information to understand how many children are overweight, healthy weight, or underweight. Results are not provided to the child or school, but are sent to parents/carers. Results are provided to the NHS and anonymised results are shared with Public Health England. This anonymised data will not identify your child, and is used for monitoring weight trends and planning services that will best support children and families.

Healthy Weight Support – as part of the Healthy Weight service, if your child meets the criteria, the team will follow up with families of identified overweight and obese children from National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) data.

If the health professionals believe the child will benefit from a healthy lifestyle programme, they will share data of the child and parents/carers to the council’s provider of leisure services, Greenwich Leisure Limited (GLL), who runs the council’s leisure centres. This is to ensure the families that require assistance are promptly referred to the programme. GLL, the leisure provider, offer free healthy lifestyle programmes where you can access advice from a registered nutritionist and physical activity specialist.

The team will also work within the children’s healthy weight pathway to raise awareness predominantly in schools or health clinics.

Breastfeeding peer supporters deliver a variety of programmes of interventions that include activities to raise the awareness of the benefits and how to overcome barriers.  This includes breastfeeding support interventions from the infant feeding support team and joint working with health professionals this is delivered predominantly in health care settings or children centres but can be in the service user’s home.

Who provides the Services

The Health Child Programme services listed above are duties of the council, and the council employs Solutions4Health (S4H) to provide trained nurses and health care professionals to deliver all of the services. S4H is a health provider and under data protection law they are considered a data controller as well as the council for these services. You can read the S4H Privacy Notice [link] for more information about how they handle your personal data.

S4H manages the service and the personal data day to day and provides anonymised statistics to the council regularly. The council does not routinely access the health data. It is partly the council’s responsibility to ensure that personal data of children and parents/carers involved in the Healthy Child Programme transfer between contractors if the service provider changes.

Safeguarding – During delivery of these services, if necessary to protect the child or other individual, safeguarding referrals may be necessary to the council safeguarding team or the police.

Personal information collected

  • Name
  • Address & contact details
  • DOB
  • Financial information (eligibility for benefits where that’s relevant to us providing you with support)
  • Equalities Information
  • Criminal/Prosecution Information (where it impacts the services being delivered to individuals, who may be under the care of the Youth Offending Service)
  • Health/Medical Information  
  • Social Services Records 
  • Other Agencies Involved 
  • Education Information 
  • Housing Information  
  • Employment information
  • Information from the Local Authority from where you live and previously lived
  • Family/Relationship Information
  • NHS Number
  • Support Network
  • Referral/Assessment Information
  • Images in photographs or film/ CCTV (The health professional may discuss with you taking photographs or video of you to support individuals, for example, for an activity like a breastfeeding support group.)

Who we share the information with

  • DWP 
  • Police 
  • Health Agencies 
  • Council or similar services (eg Public health, Early Help services and Children Centres)
  • HMRC (eg eligibility for benefits where that’s relevant to us providing you with support)
  • Government departments (Office of Health Improvement and Disparities)
  • Professional regulatory bodies
  • Probation/Prison Services (where clients are under the responsibility of the Youth Offending Service)
  • UK Border Agency
  • Insurance companies
  • Other local authorities
  • Ofsted
  • Voluntary Agencies /Third Sector
  • Housing providers (eg eligibility for benefits where that’s relevant to us providing you with support)
  • GLL, the council’s leisure provider, that delivers the healthy activity programme for children
  • Home Office (eligibility for benefits where that’s relevant to us providing you with support, or where we are supporting asylum seekers)

Legislation that applies

  • Children Act 2004 - is the main legislation which governs and protects children. All people and organisations working with children have a responsibility to help safeguard children and promote their welfare. This includes work to safeguard children which is further guided by the ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ (HM Government, 2018).
     
  • The Healthy Child Programme 0 – 5 and 5 – 19 (2009) is a key guidance document which places health visitors and school nurses as lead professionals in the health and development of children working in a collaborative way with other key partners.
     
  • The Local Authorities (Public Health Functions and Entry to Premises by Local Healthwatch Representatives) and Local Authority (Public Health, Health and Wellbeing Boards and Health Scrutiny) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 require local authorities to commission delivery of specific universal elements of the Healthy Child Programme (HCP), termed in the Regulations as Universal Health Visitor Reviews.
  • antenatal health promoting visit;
  • new baby review;
  • 6-8 week assessment;
  • 1 year assessment; and
  • 2 to 2½ year review

How long we keep your information

Your personal data is kept until the child’s 25th birthday, or 26th birthday if the child was 17 at conclusion of treatment. for 25 years.

Solutions4Health, as a healthcare organisation, keep your data for the same period.