Healthcare for children in foster and residential care

It is a sad fact that child health and child welfare services tend to run in parallel tracks in many European societies. As a consequence, we know surprisingly little about the health situation and health needs of children in foster and residential care in Europe This is in stark contrast to the USA where paediatricians within the American Academy of Pediatrics have been deeply involved with health issues of foster care for several decades (1). The study on runaway children in Spain by Gonzalvo Oliván in this issue of Acta Pædiatrica (2) demonstrates that child health professionals are needed in foster and residential care in Europe as well, a fact that is further underlined by the high mortality rates found in recent studies of children in foster care in Scandinavia (3, 4).