How widely are personal child health records used and are they effective health education tools? A comparison of two records
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Although the Personal Child Health Records (PCHR) has been in use for 15 years, its efficacy as a health education tool has not been evaluated. The phased introduction of a new, professionally designed record within a large cohort study provided the opportunity to compare parental rating and use of the different records and recall of health topics covered. Subjects and methods All babies born over a 15-month period were eligible. Half (679) were born during study recruiting periods and received an expanded version of the new record; 30% (411) were born in non-recruiting periods and received the old record and 20% (279) were born after the new record had been fully introduced. Parents completed a one-page postal questionnaire when their child was aged 6-17 months. Results Parents rated both record types highly and the majority used them regularly to take to baby clinics and for information. Health visitors wrote frequently in the record, compared with only half of parents and less than a quarter of family doctors. Old format records were significantly more likely to be taken to and written in by the family doctor. Parents used new format records less as a source of information, but were no more likely to use other recommended information sources. Parents with new format records showed better recall of information found only, or more prominently in the new records, but the actual differences were small. Conclusions The PCHR remains popular with parents, but is still underused except by health visitors. Recall of health information in the record is fairly poor, but families make little use of other, better information sources. Professional redesign did not improve the efficacy of the record.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.046 | 0.246 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".