Sweden’s Västra Götaland region has developed a database, in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to gain a better understanding of the health and well-being of young people in the region. This database of self-reported health data facilitates evidence-based policy-making on children's health and living conditions, taking into account young people's views on their own health. The region shares insights gained with its 49 municipalities and 100 private schools, and plays an important role in enhancing health-care delivery to children and youth in the country.
The new database includes indicators on school environment, living conditions, physical activity, friends and family, sleep, diet, physical and mental health, stress, after-school activities, games, sexual health, experiences of violence, alcohol consumption and body mass index. "We noticed that school nurses were collecting all this valuable and important information without being able to share and compare it within or between schools and municipalities, so we started to think about how we could support them," explains Lena Simonsson-Garsbo, Chief Medical Officer at the City of Gothenburg's school health system and the main initiator of the project.
"The project has its origin in the development of a regional plan for increased equity in health," adds Göran Henriksson, Senior Advisor for Social Medicine, Department of Data Management and Analysis, Västra Götaland. "We soon realized that we lacked relevant data on the health and living conditions of the younger population, and that the region and the municipalities had a common interest in being able to follow the development of health during school years."
Patient-centred solutions
WHO/Europe supports Member States in the digitalization of health systems and advances in digital storage of health information, as organized data helps health-care providers to make informed decisions about patient care, as well as make services more personalized.
This work aligns with the Regional digital health action plan for the WHO European Region 2023–2030, which was adopted by all Member States in 2022 and seeks to identify patient-centred solutions that can be scaled up at country or regional level to help to shape public health in the digital era.
The project started in 2013, and children and adolescents will be interviewed every year until 2020. The database was made available this year (2023). Children and adolescents are still considered the most important reference group. Both they – the target group – and the school nurses have been involved in this participatory process from the beginning.
The database was initiated by the services closest to the young people, i.e. the school health services, as they had no means of keeping and comparing their data. This has made the process transparent for the main users.