Health Screening of Four‐year‐olds in a Swedish County

Sundelin, C. and Vuille, J.‐C. (Department of Paediatrics, University Hospital, Uppsala, Sweden and the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Berne, Berne, Switzerland). Health screening of four‐year‐olds in a Swedish county II. Effectiveness in detecting health problems. Acta Paediatr Scand, 64: 801, 1975.–Quantitative results obtained during the first 3 years of operation of a routine health screening program for 4‐year‐olds are presented. From these figures it is concluded that the effectiveness in detecting previously unknown health problems needing treatment is high enough to justify the continuation of this systematic health screening by the ordinary child health staff. However, the total prevalence of newly detected anomalies was lower in our population than in similar studies where the screening was performed by a few teams of specially trained professionals. The consequences of this observation are briefly discussed.