Hayley, Age 6, Abbotsford
2nd Session, 38th Parliament – November 29, 2006
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Hayley, Age 6, Abbotsford
Today there’s actually very little information available on the general health of B.C.’s school children. When you look at the data we have, it’s often based on small samples or on groupings of children and/or schools. When planning programs designed to change behaviour, you must have a means of evaluating how you are doing. You must also be able to conduct comparisons amongst different regions or communities. We do not have this information now, and if we are going to effectively plan and evaluate how our initiatives are doing, we do need this information. (British Columbia Medical Association)
A key message that the Committee heard from the province’s medical practitioners was the need for the creation of a child health registry. Over the course of two 13-year cycles of kindergarten to grade 12 students, the rates of measured childhood overweight or obese have more than quadrupled. Yet, over the same period of time, the amount of data collected showing this disturbing trend is limited at best. Indeed, the current dataset used to calculate the rates of obesity in B.C.’s children is from Statistics Canada’s 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey, which collected data in 2002. Updated information on this dataset will likely not even begin to be collected until 2007, with new survey results not released until 2009 or 2010. To underscore how important it is to collect this data in a timely manner, consider that over this time frame, an entire generation of students from grades four to 12 will have gone through the education system.
The Committee heard a proposal from the British Columbia Medical Association for a basic child health database that would provide for the collection of basic health data twice a year from school-aged children. The objective of the registry is to collect basic health information (height, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio) from all children enrolled in kindergarten to grade 12 in order to track student physical fitness and health levels across the province. The creation of such a database would allow researchers to track the effectiveness of specific programs and compare health outcomes to other socio-economic statistical databases. Information provided to the registry would require the informed consent of parents with the data collected remaining anonymous.
While the proposal we heard for data collection was strictly related to overweight and obesity levels in B.C.’s schools, the Committee believes that it is also important to collect information on students’ levels of physical activity. We note that to some extent, small scale surveys on levels of physical activity are currently being conducted during the ActionSchools! BC program evaluation. However, the sample size used in these studies is still quite small. The Committee believes that continual, large scale monitoring of the rates of physical inactivity will paint a better picture on how B.C. is doing in reducing the levels of childhood obesity and physical inactivity.
It should be noted that our proposed child health registry for British Columbia does not involve parental notification of results. However, some jurisdictions go further than the measures proposed here — requiring notification of a child’s body mass index results to parents. 2
The Committee recommends that:
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© 2006 Legislative Assembly of British Columbia