Lika för alla? Social position och etnicitet som determinanter för amning, föräldrars rökvanor och kontakter med BVC

Sammanfattning: Child Health Services (CHS) in Sweden are offered free of charge to all Swedish parents with children 0-5 years of age.  The regular service schedule includes home visits, health examinations, vaccinations and participation in parenting groups. The CHS should pay extra attention to disadvantaged families.The aim of this thesis was to investigate to what extent the CHS reaches groups of families with special needs, e.g. immigrant families, low income families, young and single mothers, with universal or selective measures, as well as to investigate the variation of two determinants of child health, second hand smoke and breastfeeding, in these groups of families. The thesis also aimed at investigating validity of data in the county CHS quality database (Basta). The thesis is based on data from Basta together with several national registers.The CHS equally reached all families with infants with the universal program except for participation in parenting group. Foreign born, young, single and low-income mothers had lower participation rates. Smoking rates were lower in foreign-born than in Swedish-born mothers and higher for foreign-born than in Swedish-born fathers. Smoking was more common among single and low income parents and young mothers. Young and single mothers had lower breastfeeding rates at 6 months. At 12 months the breastfeeding rates were higher among foreign-born mothers. The validity test of data in the Basta database showed sensitivity values for immunizations, breastfeeding and smoking at 90-100 % and for any home visit, participation in parenting group at any time, a minimum number of 6 visits at the Child Health Centre (CHC) and a minimum number of 11 visits at the CHC at 88 - 96 %. The sensitivity value for the exact match of number of CHC visits (+/- 3 visits) was 88 %.Conclusions: The universal programme was equally distributed in different immigrant and socio-demographic populations. However, the results did not indicate equality according to the assumption that some families need more input than others in order to achieve equity of outcome.Individual data routinely collected from CHS records to a quality database provides data of good quality that can be used for both quality surveillance and research.