Childhood Obesity

Child Health Systems Programme

All NHS Boards in Scotland provide a Child Health Surveillance Programme where children are offered routine reviews at various stages in their life. The majority of Boards record these reviews using the Child Health Systems Programme (CHSP). As the systems are implemented in the majority of NHS Boards, data they collect on height and weight measurements can be used to estimate the prevalence of overweight and underweight children in Scotland.

Height and weight measurements are recorded at the Primary 1 review. Previously, height and weight measurements were also collected from reviews at 39-42 months, Primary 7 and Secondary 3. However, following the recommenations published in the 2005 report Health for all Children (Hall 4) : Guidance on Implementation in Scotland a revised programme of child health surveillance has been implemented in Scotland and universal reviews at 39-42 months, Primary 7 and Secondary 3 no longer take place. Consequently, the latest BMI obesity statistics for children aged around 3.5 years old are for those born in 2001 and the latest available BMI obesity statistics for children in Primary 7 and Secondary 3 are for school year 2004/05.

Child Health Systems Programme - Implementation Dates

All NHS Boards provide a Child Health Surveillance Programme and the majority of Boards record these reviews using the Child Health Systems Programme (CHSP).

CHSP - Pre-School (CHSP-PS) currently has 12* participating NHS Boards. BMI obesity statistics for pre-school children have been derived from data recorded at the 39-42 month review. 

CHSP - School (CHSP-S) has 11* participating NHS Boards.  However, NHS Grampian have only recently begun to partially implement CHSP-S and NHS Ayrshire & Arran only began implementation in August 2007. Therefore data for these two Boards are excluded from the BMI obesity statistics.

NHS Board	CHSP-PS implementation date	CHSP-S implementation date
Ayrshire & Arran	1993	August 2007
Borders	1995	1995
Dumfries & Galloway	Dec 2000	2004
Fife	1994	2000
Forth Valley	Dec 1997	2005
Grampian (partial)	-	2005
Greater Glasgow & Clyde             Argyll & Clyde*             Greater Glasgow	1991 1995	- 2001 -
Highland	May 2007	-
Lanarkshire	1992	1999
Lothian NHS Board (West Lothian NHS Trust)	1994	2004 (1997)
Orkney	-	-
Shetland	-	-
Tayside	1995	2002
Western Isles	May 2006	2003

 

* NHS Argyll & Clyde partially implemented CHSP-S in 2001. The system was further rolled out for school year 2005/06. Argyll and Clyde ceased to exist on 31st March 2006 and the administration area was split into two sub-areas that now fall under the administration of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Highland respectively. However, since neither of the former Boards (Greater Glasgow and Highland) had implemented CHSP-S, statistics for the former Argyll and Clyde Board have been presented as before.

Implementation dates should be taken into consideration when examining trends in BMI obesity statistics. For further implementation details, please see the footnotes in the relevant statistics tables.