Improving Health and Developmental Outcomes for Children aged 0 to 5 years: Child Health and Development Check Pilot Phase 1

Child Health Development Checks Purpose and Scope
The Office for Early Childhood Development (OECD) (formerly the Office for the Early Years (OEY)) partnered with the Flinders University, Caring Futures Institute (CFI) to pilot a novel method to offer families Child Health Development Checks (CHDC) and referral support. The initiative forms part of the Early Learning Strategy (ELS) 2021 to 2031 to increase child health development checks up to 80% of eligible children and reduce the proportion of children in South Australia (SA) assessed as ‘developmentally vulnerable’ in one or more domains of the Australian Early Development Census by facilitating multiple referral pathways well before the child commences school (Government of South Australia 2021 p 20).
The initial scope of the pilot included the participation of 20 pre-selected Goodstart Early Learning Centres across South Australia that hosted the pilot program.
The key objectives of the Caring Futures Institute (CFI) pilot were to ensure:
• Parents/caregivers were informed and had greater awareness of child development checks.
• Children, with parental consent, received their age-appropriate health and development checks.
• Parents of children identified as requiring monitoring or having a potential developmental vulnerability, were referred for further assistance.
• Parents/carers were able to attend the Health and Development checks.
• The provision of opportunistic Health and Development Checks for children in their usual daytime place e.g. Goodstart Early Learning Centre occurred.
• Place-based, community embedded Health and Development Checks were provided.
• The provision of upscaled Mobile Health and Development Checks were sustainable.
• The application and use of the Health Assessment and Brigance tools were appropriate for this type of check.
• The child’s key educator had a voice and input into the assessment process and outcomes.
This document reports on the findings from the CFI CHDC Pilot Phase 1. The pilot was independently evaluated by external providers (Sawyer et al 2023). The Terms of Reference for Phase 1 were effective from August 2022 and continued until the end of September 2023.