The June issue of the “Journal of Health Monitoring” (2023 8-2), jointly sponsored by RKI and Destatis, deals with child and adolescent health in the federal health reporting series (1) and provides articles on current epidemiological issues Subjects. Among other things, Prof. Dr. Ute Thyen, APL professor at the Clinic for Child and Adolescent Medicine at the University of Lübeck, in her editorial: “The country needs new data”.

>> In her editorial for the issue of the “Journal of Health Monitoring” Prof. Dr. Ute Thyen, President of the German Society for Social Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine since 2017, initially stated that the observation (health monitoring) of
developments in the
The health of children and young people is of great importance for two main reasons:
1. Continuous data collected without special reasons reveal positive and negative trends and are available promptly for health policy decisions when acute changes in living environments occur.
2. The synopsis of socio-spatial characteristics, individual risk factors and health status offers opportunities to develop and implement a health-promoting health-in-all-policies strategy and to measure the success of measures.

To this end, the federal government's health reporting requires continuous national and, if possible, representative data collection that contains both survey and examination data. For this purpose, the RKI Health Panel is currently being set up at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which in the future will include around 100,000 people throughout Germany (note: actually what Prof. Dr. Max Geraedts said in the cover interview of the MVF issue 04/23 demands). According to Thyen, this panel will also make it possible to question their children with the help of the recruited adults.
In addition to the data approaches described in the journal such as the “Study on the Health of Children and Adolescents in Germany” (KiGGS), the “Study on Children’s Health in Germany Current” (KIDA) and alternatively available health data such as school entry data, Thyen believes that other data sources are necessary . It would also be conceivable in the future to take into account aspects of environmental and climate justice and the experience of violence in the neighborhood. It is noteworthy that many state health authorities took part in projects as part of the Federal Ministry of Health's “Strengthening cooperation between the public health service and public health research” funding line. Thyen in her editorial: “The collaboration between the Public Health Service as local public health and the Robert Koch Institute as the National Public Health Institute is gaining momentum and should be expanded not only in infection protection, but also in health reporting.”
However, according to Thyens, in addition to population-based data collection, more specific questions need to be answered through other approaches, for example by paying special attention to children and young people in surveillance systems, as in the journal article “Respiratory tract infections in children and young people in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic” will be shown.
Further access to health monitoring would also include special diagnosis-specific registers, as the concerns of children and young people with less common illnesses cannot be reflected in general health surveys. However, it is also useful to integrate information from population-based health monitoring, specific surveillance procedures and clinical-epidemiological registers, which would provide comprehensive data for the promotion and protection of the health of children and young people in the country in a timely and continuous manner. Thyen: “This was already the case before the Covid-19 pandemic, the consequences of climate change, the increasing social disadvantage and educational poverty among children and young people, but the experiences of the last three years have shown us how difficult it is when crises hit less resilient public health systems. This should now change and that’s a good thing.” <<