Pre-school age children in Derby

Giving every child the best start in life is crucial to reducing health inequalities across the life course. The foundations for virtually every aspect of human development - physical, intellectual and emotional - are laid in early childhood. What happens during these early years, starting in the womb, has lifelong effects on many aspects of health and wellbeing - from obesity, heart disease and mental health, to educational achievement and economic status. To have an impact on health inequalities we need to address the social gradient in children's access to positive early experiences. Later interventions, although important, are considerably less effective if they have not had good early foundations

Marmot, 2010

Children in Derby have a relatively poor start in life when compared to England as a whole. Derby has a significantly:

• higher percentage of children living in poverty
• higher rate of teenage pregnancies
• higher proportions of mothers smoking at the time of delivery
• higher rate of low birth weight term babies
• lower level of breastfeeding initiation
• lower level of children achieving a good level of development at the end of reception year.

Children in Derby do however, have high levels of immunisation uptake across most childhood immunisation protecting them from a range of diseases such as diphtheria, measles and meningitis.

The latest nationally published information on childhood health and wellbeing can be found in the interactive tools Child Health Profiles and Children and Young People's Health Benchmarking Tool produced by Public Health England.

Public Health England's Local Health provides an interactive geographical tool showing a range of health and related measures at Clinical Commissioning Group, local authority and ward level information.

Additionally, a range of information, including health, is provided for each of Derby's seventeen wards and can be found within the quick ward profiles on the info4derby website.

Derby's Children and Young Peoples Plan (CYP Plan) sets out what we want to achieve as a partnership to address the needs of all children and young people, their families and carers.

Derby’s Integrated Commissioning Strategy for Children and Young People commits to a joint way of working and aims to improve outcomes through better joint commissioning.

The pages in this section explore the level of need in this population in relation to these focussed subject areas.