The Supreme Council of Health (SCH) plans to implement World Health Organisation-adopted new growth charts/curve to monitor the health conditions of the children here. A workshop will be organised to train some 30 doctors, nurses and nutrition specialists as part of implementing the new WHO Child Growth Standards.
“The new chart will help detect the children at risk of malnutrition and early detection of the obesity among the others because they contain an outline of the body mass index which helps to avoid these problems. The workshop aims to train the participants according to the new programme that was approved by WHO in 2006,” said Dr Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Director of the Department of Public Health at SCH.
“Qatar is at the forefront of implementing the advanced health systems to care and follow-up child health; one of the best ways to do this is while they are growing as it can provide a healthy life and protect them from disease.”
The new WHO Child Growth Standards are the result of an intensive study initiated by WHO in 1997 to develop a new international standard for assessing the physical growth, nutritional status and motor development in children.
The charts are based on samples of children from six different countries representing the continents of the world — Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the United States. The previous chart does not provide accurate data due to ethnic differences in growth among children.
The new charts make it possible to show how children should grow. It demonstrate for the first time ever that children born in different regions of the world and given the optimum start in life, have the potential to grow and develop to within the same range of height and weight for age.
Normal growth is an essential expression of health and a way to measure efforts designed to reduce child mortality and disease. The new charts therefore provide a simple tool to assess the effectiveness of such efforts. It can help monitoring the well-being of children and for detecting children or populations not growing properly or under- or overweight and may require specific medical or public health responses.
“The new programme will give a complete picture of the child’s growth. The programme here is divided into four types based on length-for-age, weight-for-age, length-for-weight and BMI-for-age,” said Dr Sheikha Anoud bint Mohammed Al Thani, Director of Health Promotion and Non-communicable Diseases at SCH.
“The training of all doctors, nurses and nutritionists will take a year, after which the charts will be applied. The programme will be implemented in two separate series of charts first covering new-borns to five years and the second for five to 19 years of age,” she said.
The Peninsula