HEALTH experts have set ambitious targets to reduce rates of still births and infant mortality in the next three years.
The government-backed Early Years Collaborative (EYC) wants a 15% fall in the rate of babies stillborn and children who die before their first birthday by the end of 2015.
The new drive to tackle health inequality in early childhood was announced as the EYC held its first major conference yesterday.
Two other targets were established – to get 85% of children aged between 27 and 30 months hitting all expected development milestones by the end of 2016; and 90% of primary school starters meeting their development targets by the end of 2017.
Attributes judged in the milestone tests include reading ability, motor skills, communication skills and social and emotional behaviour.
Chief Medical Officer Sir Harry Burns said: "The evidence is incontrovertible – improving health equality and life expectancy rests on tackling the problems in early years. Problems in early years lead to poor educational attainment, increased offending, poor health. I am clear this process cannot be top down – we must all work with people to gather insight, offer opportunities and give people control.
"This is an exciting and pioneering process that I am pleased to be involved in and am confident we can deliver change."
Some 750 health experts gathered in Glasgow yesterday to debate what changes were needed locally to reach the new goals.
For the targeted 15% fall to be met, stillbirth rates must drop from 4.9 per 1000 births to 4.3, while infant mortality has to fall from 3.7 per 1000 births to 3.1.
Scotland's current infant mortality rate is already the lowest on record and below the rest of the UK, but higher than Scandinavian countries.
Earlier this week The Herald revealed that long-term targets to cut infant mortality, stillbirths and low birth weight babies were due to be announced.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article