Responding to Key Data on Young People 2017 from The Association for Young People’s Health (AYPH), Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s Officer for Health Promotion, Professor Russell Viner said:
These latest figures from AYPH provide further grim, yet wholly familiar, reading for anyone working in the field of children and young people’s health. So often this age group is forgotten and the report importantly highlights the many areas where our health services need to be better geared towards catering to this vulnerable group, but what is also clear is that poverty magnifies and hugely impacts upon child health and wellbeing.
In our landmark State of Child Health report we found that of the 25 key markers of child health, 24 were adversely affected by poverty. With one in four children living in poverty today and that number set to rise, we are indeed sitting on a young people’s health time bomb. To protect the most vulnerable in society, a step in the right direction would be to restore binding national targets to reduce child poverty and for government to adopt a ‘child health in all policies’ approach to decision making across the board.
Ends.