Connected Health Cities responds to today’s State of Child Health 2017 report recommendation for government to ‘develop an integrated system to ensure data systems across all age groups in health, social care, youth justice and education are connected’.

Dr Hakim Yadi OBE, CEO of the Northern Health Science Alliance which is delivering Health North: Connected Health Cities (CHC), said:

 “Connected Health Cities is already delivering projects which tie together data from health and social care sources to improve the care of children and adults across the North.

 “We wholly support the call from the State of Child Health report for an integrated system to make sure data across all age groups in health, social care, youth justice and education are connected.

 “CHC’s pioneering work linking health and social care data in the North should be scaled out across the UK to build on the excellent work that carers, medical practitioners and data scientists are conducting.

 “In Yorkshire a CHC project is securely analysing data from the Born in Bradford project, health data such as information from maternity services like the birthweight of new babies, and additional data such as that collected in schools as part of the National Child Measurement Programme.

“This will allow researchers to gain a better understanding of how childhood obesity occurs and how, when, and in what ways they can support families to help prevent the development of obesity.

“Projects like this will have a massive impact in providing robust information to those tackling the root causes of health inequality in children across the UK.”

• For more information on Connected Health Cities connectedhealthcities.org
• For more information on the Northern Health Science Alliance visit thenhsa.co.uk