What does it mean?

Population services is about providing care that helps all children. It's about improving things for the entire population. It's about improving the fairness of care.

Why is it needed?

By improving health and healthcare at a population level, we can improve health for every child and all children. This is often expressed as "a rising tide lifts all boats".

What makes it happen?

Population health is often about background support for frontline care, and about services that improve things without always being obviously noticed.

Preventive care is a good example. One of CYPHP's services is about building resilience in schools, aiming to improve children's mental health and wellbeing before they might need help.

Similarly, improving the education and training of health professionals and helping them work more closely with each other in CYP health teams, should drive improvements in the quality of care, so that's another population level service.

Finally, we're committed to improving the equity (fairness) of care for children. So we have specific services for children and young people who need extra help. We're working specifically to provide better support for Looked After Children and Care Leavers.

How will we know it's better?

We'll be measuring the impact of population services directly and indirectly, and aim to show improvements in children's health, healthcare quality, and in the way that the health system works.

What does it mean?

CYPHP is committed to using the best available evidence to shape and deliver healthcare for children and young people. In addition, CYPHP is dedicated to improving the knowledge base for children and young people's (CYP) healthcare. This means that we can continuously improve health and healthcare for children and young people.

Why is it needed?

Health research about CYP has traditionally been a laboratory-based endeavour. Most work has focused on developing medicines and technologies. The advances made in paediatric medicine have been tremendous. Now we need to turn our attention urgently towards making sure that we organise and deliver CYP healthcare in the best possible ways.

What makes it happen?

We are developing a Learning Health System for Children and Young People. Click here for more information. We are focusing on research areas that concern the health needs of most CYP, and ensuring that we have a means of translating knowledge directly into improvements in care. Our motivation in CYPHP is to improve health across the whole CYP population. That's why we are directing our efforts towards improving knowledge in areas that matter most to the largest number of children and young people, and using that knowledge to improve healthcare for CYP.

CYPHP research and evaluation is led by a dedicated team of researchers, clinicians, analysts, and managers working in partnership with the CYPHP programme team and with local children, young people, and families. We are part of King's Health Partners, our Academic Health Science Centre, which comprises King's College London, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (including Evelina London Children's Healthcare), King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. And we work in close partnership with our partners in primary care and our local commissioners of care Lambeth and Southwark CCGs, and their partner Local Authorities including schools.

CYPHP research and evaluation is part of a growing research group, the Maternal - CYP Population Health and Policy Research group (MCPPR). MCPPR is developing two broad work streams:

Building a Learning Health System for the Maternal-CYP continuum

This means conducting maternal and child health service delivery, systems, and policy research. The purpose is to produce and use evidence to design, test, implement, and evaluate public health and healthcare interventions, providing the basis for a continuous cycle of improved health and care quality and safety for women and children.

Knowledge translation and analysis

The purpose here is to to produce reviews and rapid response briefings designed to shape practice and policy, locally, and nationally. The ultimate aim of our work is to strengthen the health system for maternal and child health.

How will we know it's better?

When continuous learning and improvement in children's health becomes the usual way of working.

For more information, or to get involved, please click here.

What does it mean?

CYP health teams work together across settings and professions in the best interests of children, young people, and families.

Why is it needed?

Different organisations and different professional backgrounds can make it difficult to form teams.

What makes it happen?

CYP health teams include GPs, Paediatricians, Psychiatrists and mental health workers, physical and mental health, health and social and education sectors. CYP teams work as closely as possible to where children and young people are – home, school, and community health settings, and when necessary, hospitals. A team approach fosters a comprehensive CYP-friendly bio-psycho-social approach to care.

How will we know it's better?

Health teams are more confident, competent, and content. Parents and CYP are more confident in using primary care for first contact care.

What does it mean?

The CYPHP's vision for education and training is to promote a culture of continuous improvement through creating, developing, and supporting formal and informal opportunities for transformative learning.

Why is it needed?

Education and training is part of our overall service delivery model and is embedded throughout the programme to support and strengthen the local health and social care system in a sustainable way. It brings together a number of cross cutting themes within our programme.

Mind-body: Reflecting our service’s commitment to overcome the traditional mind-body divide in healthcare, and provide care for the whole child.

Integration: Actively seeking opportunities to support inter-professional collaboration, awareness of the role of others, and the importance of working effectively across organisational boundaries, thereby modelling good examples of joined up care centred on children, young people and families.

Public Health: Fostering better awareness and skills development for front-line practitioners with regards to health promotion, early intervention and disease prevention, thereby promoting a focus on population health as well as individual outcomes.

What makes it happen?

As part of the cultural change, CYPHP team- based education and training aims to develop a shared learning environment which facilitates meaningful professional development and helps people to identify and achieve their own personal potential.

The opportunity to learn and grow through joint working and mutual observation is a central part of the CYPHP model. By supporting joint working/clinics we are promoting the sharing of expertise and supporting a range of professionals in delivering better everyday health care for children.

A transformative approach to training and education includes bridging the gaps between health and non-health professionals and families, as a means towards improving health and health outcomes.

How will we know it’s better?

We will ensure that all our education and training initiatives incorporate an appropriate evaluation strategy, which is proportionate to the scale and ambition of the training delivery. A full evaluation of the overall impact of the Education and Training Strategy will overlap with the Programme’s process evaluation.

Click here to download our Education & Training Strategy PDF

What does it mean?

CYP with common problems can get the help they need closer to home and school.

Why is it needed?

Parents often feel they need to take their children to A&E to get prompt expert help and advice. Professionals often can't cooperate with each other as they would like to do. Patients shuttle back and forth between home, hospital, and GP.

What makes it happen?

CYP health teams and clinics, comprehensive CYP-centred bio-psycho-social assessments, eg. Teen Health Check, multidisciplinary training, decision support tools, hotlines, YP-friendly care, schools as part of health teams, social and youth workers, behaviour change support, enhanced support for looked after children and care leavers, CYP-friendly technology, and health promotion is core to care.

How will we know it is better?

Children are healthier, care quality improves, health professionals are more confident and competent in everyday child health, there are fewer outpatient appointments, A&E attendances and hospital admissions for everyday conditions.

What does it mean?

CYP with long-term conditions get comprehensive care that considers body, mind, and social circumstances.

Why is it needed?

Care is often fragmented and inconvenient, treats each part and each problem of the child separately. Long-term condition care often takes second place after acute services

What makes it happen?

CYP health teams and clinics, comprehensive bio-psycho-social approach to care, schools are part of health teams, behaviour change support, medication reviews, social and youth workers, health promotion is a core part of care.

How will we know it's better?

Children are healthier, fewer exacerbations of disease, quality of care improves, satisfaction with services improves, fewer admissions to hospital.

What does it mean?

Health and wellbeing are holistic concepts, and physical and mental health are intimately connected. CYPHP's Mind and Body approach to care means focusing on the whole child or young person. Truly CYP-centred care means considering physical and mental health together, as standard practice.

Why is it needed?

Physical and mental health are too often considered separately in healthcare. This makes it harder to deliver CYP-centred care. This fragmentation particularly affects CYP with long-term conditions.

What makes it happen?

CYPHP has developed a model of care for CYP with long-term conditions which starts by looking at the whole child, considering their physical, mental, and social needs. Care can then be delivered according to need.

How will we know it's better?

CYP with long-term conditions will have more comprehensive care which accounts for their physical, mental, and social needs. Holistic care will start becoming standard practice. CYP will be healthier.

What does it mean?

Adopting a holistic children and young people (CYP) centred approach to care so that health promotion becomes a central part of front-line healthcare. In addition, CYPHP adopts a public health approach to designing and delivering services. This means ensuring services are tailored as closely as possible to population need, and that healthcare aligns with public health and public policy in the best interests of CYP.

Why is it needed?

Public health, health promotion, and disease prevention are too often separate from healthcare. CYP-centred care looks at the whole child, in the context of their family and community, and considers health promotion a core activity. Public health and public policy are vital elements of protecting and improving health and wellbeing and maximising development.

What makes it happen?

A range of measures help put health promotion and public health at the core of our approach to care. At the level of the individual CYP - clinician interaction, this means measures such as ensuring guidelines and clinical decision support tools include health promotion and disease prevention in addition to treating problems after they have happened. We also work at the population level, shaping services according to the needs of the community. For example, we tailor services carefully to account for and include CYP who need healthcare but may not find it easy to access services. We strive to reduce health inequities among CYP through the way we design and deliver healthcare.

How will we know it's better?

Children are healthier, health promotion becomes a core part of healthcare, and healthcare access inequities are reduced.

What does it mean?

Children and young people need many things to ensure they grow up healthy and well. Healthcare is important, together with public health, public policy, schools, the environment, the economy and more. A health system comprises all the things that focus primarily on health. Strengthening health systems means improving all the things that directly affect health, and ensuring that the health system works synergistically with the parts of government and society that affect the wider determinants of health.

CYPHP is committed to improving children and young people's health through improving healthcare, strengthening the health system, and working with partners to improve the wider determinants of health.

What does it mean?

Information about health need and system performance is constantly gathered and fed back to ensure continuous improvement of care.

Click here to find out more about Research and Evaluation

"Helping children and young people to be healthy, happy, and well"

CYPHP is committed to honouring the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). There are many rights enshrined in the UNCRC. CYPHP is especially concerned with the Articles about healthcare. These specify, for example, that CYP are entitled to good quality healthcare - the best healthcare possible; that children who are looked after by their local authorities have care that should always be based on the best interests of the child; that children have the right to say what they think should happen and have their views taken into account; and that the best interests of all children should be the primary concern in making decisions that affect them, particularly among budget, policy, and lawmakers.