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Healthy Child Programme

With a cost of living crisis in full flow, central government battling inflation, and a desperate need for a digital overhaul of many of the UK’s health and care systems, now more than ever it’s crucial for service providers like local councils to be as efficient and effective as possible.

Delivering the Healthy Child Programme is a core duty of local authorities, but there’s a lack of consistency in the delivery of this support – in no small part due to ineffective processes.

Back in November 2016, NHS England published a digital strategy guide called Healthy Children: Transforming Child Health Information; an action plan detailing how child health information should be more accessible. Their take is that sharing the information helps both professionals and parents, and patient engagement is something that has shown great results in other aspects of care, but at present it’s still only a minority of councils able to do this.

In this article we’re going to explore what the Healthy Child Programme is, as well as the challenges that local councils are facing – beyond the need for digitisation – and in what ways providers like The Access Group can help support the authorities with our software solutions.

Social Care Health & Support
5 minutes
Liam Sheasby healthcare writer

by Liam Sheasby

Healthcare writer

Posted 11/12/2024

A physical education class, helping keep children healthy.

What is the healthy child programme?

The Healthy Child Programme is a government-driven support scheme, enacted by local councils for their local population. It is a universal programme for all children between the ages of 0-19 years old, and assistance and support is evidence-based.

Launched in October 2009, the purpose of the Healthy Child Programme was and still is to identify areas where services can intervene in the lives of children and their families, with the goal of improving health and ensuring the best possible development of young people.

The services are typically split between the Healthy Child Programme 0-5 and the Healthy Child Programme 5-19. For the younger ages there’s typically visitation and service centres, whilst older children are more supported through schooling instead of a midwife and other visits. All ages in this coverage are backed by immunisations, general screening tests, and development reviews to ensure things like height and weight are okay.

Examples of programme delivery can be found on the Birmingham City Council and the Surrey County Council websites respectively.

What challenges are councils struggling with?

As part of the National Healthy Child Programme, councils require input from a whole range of organisations, as well as children and their parents. This is difficult to achieve for many authorities for a number of reasons – one being the need for more modern or more advanced technology (software solutions) to provide to systems and functionality that is required to link different people, records, and systems together.

Below is a fairly comprehensive list of challenges that councils are struggling with; some strategic, some technical.

  • Inequality of healthcare, based on demographics
  • Health and care is often not integrated around the child and parents
  • Difficulty in understanding the productivity and outcome of service
  • Lack of visibility around performance
  • Slow processes and mitigation, causing damage to reputation
  • Poor data insight, causing difficulty in future planning
  • Integrating with various third party systems/services to maintain or improve interoperability (e.g. Care Record Portals, NEMS, CCG regions, etc
  • Real-time data reporting for structured and un-structured data
  • A Healthy Child specific EPR allowing the service to customise and configure the system according to the service needs
  • View existing data and record new data where and when required and report and share that data with the Community Services Data Set
  • Mobilising the workforce

In order for the Councils to run efficiently and effectively to improve their care of patients, they need the ability to customise and configure their systems to map to their service needs​

A big one on that list of challenges is the National Events Management Service (NEMS), which is a communication channel run through the NHS Spine. Its purpose is nationwide sharing of specific health information for a patient, all in real time. Councils need to be reporting into these systems, which is where providers such as Access come in…

“It’s unprecedented for a local authority to provide nursing services like this, so we needed a system that was designed to meet our needs, so we can best serve the children and families of Somerset.”

Sarah Bourne, Children’s Nurse and Clinical Lead at Somerset County Council, speaking to Health Tech World about their partnership with The Access Group.
Children learning about healthy eating via gardening.

Delivering solutions for councils

As a solutions provider, we at The Access Group are always going to back our own software and advocate for our technology, but lets first recap what councils want from a provider.

Councils are looking to deliver on the Healthy Child Programme key performance indicators (KPIs)​ and as aspiring for accreditation like the UNICEF Gold Baby Friendly status or UNICEF Stage 3 accreditation. ​There is a wider Joint Strategic Needs Assessment to also address, as well as other partnership potentials out there, and the previously mentioned issue about inequalities in healthcare and the targets for universal care provision.

Meeting these challenges then highlights issues with technology; difficulties with existing software, the need for new or better solutions, and desired functionality required. Councils need:

  • Interoperability, to integrate with third party systems (e.g. Care Record Portals, NEMS, CCG regions, etc)
  • Greater mobile functionality, to work effectively and accurately whilst out in the community (especially in areas with poor/weak internet connectivity or signal)
  • Real-time data reporting for structured and unstructured data
  • Systems specifically built for child health services, to enable proper care planning and the measurement of outcomes
  • Systems that allow the council to customise and configure accordingly, mapping to their service needs
  • Systems that allow them to view existing data and record new data where and when required, and to report and share that data with the Community Services Data Set


The Professional Record Standards Body talks about the Healthy Child Record Standard, and how standardised digital records can support a prevention agenda through the accurate storage and presentation of information surrounding things such as immunisations, screenings, and developmental milestones.

We offer a longitudinal record; one source of the truth, one central repository of knowledge, with safeguards for patient data in the form of backups, firewalls, and permissions-based access. Our EPR solution is interoperable with many other solutions through NHS-approved APIs, meaning records kept in Rio EPR can communicate with other partners, providers, and services – including the National Event Management Service for Digital Child Health (NEMS for DCH).

The NEMS for DCH solution consolidates information received into the usual Rio screens from any events or interventions a child has received from other organisations involved in their care, ensuring infants and children receive appropriate care by giving health visitors and school nurses access to up-to-date information to support better decision making.

Beyond this, Access Rio EPR offers automated real-time data reporting, online and offline mobile working, as well as flexible system configurations to suit your council’s needs – and to suit the demands of the Healthy Child Programme. By improving operational speed and streamlining processes, we can free staff or even funds up to further enhance care delivery and outcomes. Achieving KPIs is important, but delivering world class care is the ultimate goal.

“Delayed intervention is a major contributor to health inequalities… By improving the overall efficiency of the service, families can access public nursing services more quickly, getting the support they need sooner, so they’re less likely to need as much support later on in life”.

Rachael Parker, Head of Public Health Operations, Somerset County Council

Our objective is to support the NHS’ plan for joined-up care. A nationwide system that’s intelligent and can communicate to care for a person regardless of where they are in the UK, and we want that too.

We’re doing our bit by collaborating with other providers and constantly improving and updating our solutions. We want people to want our solutions because we’re the best of breed, and it’s only by talking with partners and potential customers, and understanding their needs, that we can do this.

Rio EPR care solution banner

Liam Sheasby healthcare writer

By Liam Sheasby

Healthcare writer

Liam Sheasby is a Healthcare writer in the Access HSC team, with a Journalism degree in pocket and over eight years of experience as a writer, editor, and marketing executive.

This breadth of experience offers a well-rounded approach to content writing for the Health, Support and Care team. Liam ticks all the SEO boxes while producing easy-to-read healthcare content for curious minds and potential customers.