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Health inequalities 'tear chapters from children's lives' Dawn Primarolo MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families

Current thinking on obesity, teenage pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases dominated the Children’s Health 09 conference in London today, hosted by GovNet Communications.

Dawn Primarolo MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families, said these were now the key health issues for children. But health practitioners could take encouragement from past achievements, such as the reduction in child mortality or the decline of smoking from 50% of adults in the 1970s to 20% today, to tackle today’s health problems.

Primarolo also called on health practitioners to work together to tackle persistent inequalities in the provision of child healthcare: ‘Inequalities, as they build up over the early years, can tear whole chapters from children’s lives and sets them on a collision course with social issues in later life,’ she said.

‘We need to make sure that, by using collective action, we look out for children and families and make sure that every child is able to develop to their full potential.’

Sian Jarvis, Director-General of Communications at the Department of Health, revealed how the government’s ‘Change 4 Life’ campaign to prevent obesity aims to avoid alienating its target audience: ‘Our research found that words like ‘fit’, ‘fat’, ‘sport’ and ‘healthy lifestyle’ are a turn-off, so the campaign talks about fat in the body and emphasizes the strong links to health problems like diabetes and heart disease,’ said Jarvis. The simple slogan ‘Eat well, move more, live longer’ offers ‘a new tone of voice that enables us to bring people on board,’ Jarvis added.

Although it is too early to claim the campaign has changed behaviour, it has achieved 80% awareness among its target audience and 35% have claimed they will take action as a result , Jarvis said.

She added that recent research has shown that ‘the rate of increase in obesity is decreasing. The job of everyone in this room is to accelerate it.’

Professor Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, Children’s Commissioner for England, urged his audience to celebrate the fact that most children are loved and law-abiding but decried their negative portrayal in tabloid newspapers, citing headlines such as ‘Hoodie Law’ and ‘Yob UK’. This had helped to distort perceptions of young people so that 49% of adults now believe children are ‘a danger to each other and to adults’, according to a 2008 report by Barnado’s (‘Believe in Children’).

Aynsley-Green gave details of his ‘Buzz Off’ campaign against ultrasonic devices installed at railway stations, shopping malls and housing estates, which discourage young people from gathering by emitting a high-pitched whine which is only audible to them. He argued that children often gather in these locations because they have nowhere else to go, adding that they have a right to gather freely under the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Aynsley-Green called on the government to control their use: ‘This is an indiscriminate device,’ he said. ‘Why has the government not at least regulated their use?’