Role of Health Professionals and Community Workers in Monitoring Child Development

Enabling young children to reach their full developmental potential is a child right issue as well as critical for sustainable development. Evidence have highlighted the immense benefits of investing in early childhood development for improved health and productivity along the life course. However, an estimated 250 million i.e., 43% children under five years in low- and middle-income countries remain at risk of poor development. Early childhood development requires a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to create an enabling health and community ecosystem to promote and support each child’s right to survive and thrive. The health sector has multiple opportunities to strengthen and expand comprehensive nurturing health and child development interventions for all children including those at-risk with special needs within primary health care through its various routine interactions with parents and caregivers of children from pregnancy till two years. Today we need to prioritize and integrate comprehensive child development monitoring and counselling inclusive of reviewing the socio-economic, cultural, gender, and environmental influences on child development, provision of developmentally supportive nurturing care both at community level and through facility-based interventions while addressing maternal mental health concerns, and empowering parents for responsive care giving. This calls for capacity building of health workforce, parent/family centered approaches, social and behavior change communication, robust monitoring and evaluation, and generating additional contextualized evidence to improve policy actions.