NICEimpact: Children and Young People’s Healthcare

NICEimpact: Children and young people’s Healthcare

Published by NICE, June 2020

Since 2004, NICE has published an extensive suite of guidance and advice on children and young people, including 72 guidelines.  In June 2020 they published an impact analysis of the recommendations included in this guidance.  Some areas were doing fairly well; in others there was clearly still a lot of room for improvement. The areas looked at in more detail in relation to our age group (10-24) included:

• Prescription of antibiotics for common infections
• Managing long term conditions in the community (particularly asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and mental health)
• Annual physical health checks for all children, young people and adults with a learning disability (only approximately a quarter of 10-19 year olds get these)
• Transition from child to adult services
• Innovative technologies for children’s conditions including cancer treatments

A note on age ranges – the NICE document notes that in their work children and young people this usually refers to people under the age of 18. However, there’s no agreed definition across the health and care system, and a fixed upper limit can be unhelpful, such as in transition to adults’ services. Therefore, some of the data and information that they looked at in this report used a different age range, such as under 19, or young adults up to the age of 25.