Children’s Health, The Nation’s Wealth: Assessing and Improving Child Health

Assessing and Improving Child Health examines the information needed to help policymakers and program service providers improve and monitor children's health. This report from the Committee on Evaluation of Children's Health (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine) focuses on population health issues related to children and provides a framework for measurement of children's health. It does not recommend specific measures to monitor children's health. The report summarizes what is known about the health of children and why children's health is important. The term "children" is used to refer to the ages between birth and 18 years of age. Children's health is defined as "the extent to which individual children or groups of children are able or enabled to (a) develop and realize their potential, (b) satisfy their needs, and (c) develop the capacities that allow them to interact successfully with their biological, physical, and social environments." The committee highlights a new conceptual model of children's health and its influences, which are multiple, interactive, and changing over the course of childhood. This model depicts the relative importance and interaction of social environment, biology, physical environment, and behavior for children's health over the course of development, as well as the service and policy contexts in which children live. Critical differences between children and adults are emphasized, as are the special developmental issues of different age groups of children. The authors note improvements in U.S. children's health over the past