Identified health concerns and changes in management resulting from the Healthy Kids Check in two Queensland practices

Objectives: To determine how many children had health problems identified by the Healthy Kids Check (HKC) and whether this resulted in changes to clinical management.

Design, setting and participants: A medical records audit from two Queensland general practices, identifying 557 files of children who undertook an HKC between January 2010 and May 2013.

Main outcome measures: Child health problems identified in the medical records before, during and after the HKC.

Results: Most children in our sample had no problems detected in their medical record (56%), 21% had problems detected during the HKC assessment, 19% had problems detected before, and 4% after. Most frequent health concerns detected during the.HKC were speech and language (20%), toileting, hearing and vision (15% each), and behavioural problems (9%). Of the 116 children with problems detected during the HKC, 19 (3% of the total sample) had these confirmed, which resulted in a change of management. No further action was recorded for 9% of children. Missing data from reviews or referral outcomes for 8% precluded analyses of these outcomes. We estimated that the change in clinical management to children with health concerns directly relating to the HKC ranged between 3% and 11%.

Conclusions: Overall, data suggest that general practitioners are diligent in detecting and managing child health problems. Some of these problems were detected only during the HKC appointment, resulting in change of management for some children. Further studies are required to estimate the full benefits and harms, and particularly the false negatives and true positives, of the HKC.