The chief medical officer's report must spur action on child health

In her annual report published last month, the chief medical officer (CMO) Dame Sally Davies provided a timely reminder that improving the health, wellbeing and resilience of children and young people is a pressing need in Britain. Our Children Deserve Better found that the lives of five children every day could be saved if we could match the achievements of countries like Sweden. But what sort of changes need to be made if her encyclopaedic report is to have a lasting impact on our approach to child health?

We need policies and investment that recognise how health and the environments in which children grow up are closely inter-related. The CMO report found that a higher percentage of children and young people are in, or at risk of, poverty or social exclusion compared to the overall population. We know from other research, including NCB's Greater Expectations report published in August, that these poorer children suffer worse outcomes in almost every area of life including health: boys living in deprived areas, for example, are three times more likely to be obese than boys growing up in affluent areas and girls are twice as likely. Similarly, a higher proportion of babies born with a low birth weight come from poorer families, and more affluent schoolchildren are more likely to eat fruit daily. Solving these problems requires concerted efforts across education, public health and the NHS, as well as wider measures to tackle the cycle of deprivation and poor health outcomes, which is so unfair on children. Unfortunately, the upfront costs of addressing social inequality are unattractive to local and central government that are locked into the straitjacket of an annual budget cycle.