Validation of the Warwick Child Health and Morbidity Profile in routine child health surveillance

Objective To further validate a simple instrument for the measurement of pa rent-reported health and morbidity in infancy and childhood when used in ro utine child health surveillance as part of a whole year birth cohort study. Setting The socially and ethnically diverse city of Coventry. Methods Health visitors administered the Warwick Child Health and Morbidity profile (WCHMP), incorporated into the Parent Held Record (PHR), to the pa rents of infants born in 1996 and enrolled in the Coventry Cohort study as part of routine child health surveillance at 8 weeks and 8 months. Criterio n validity was estimated for Hospital admission status and immunization sta tus against health records and validity against medically plausible constru cts was tested by comparing responses between domains and between the two d ata collection points for the whole cohort. Results Criterion validity for parental reporting of immunization status (K appa 0.824 [95% CIs, 0.708, 0.940]) and hospital admission (Weighted Kappa 0.987 [95% CIs, 0.977, 0.997]) were high. There was a high level of concord ance between parental responses to related domains and the medically plausi ble constructs. The proportion of parents reporting chronic illness, acute significant illness, chronic illness and accidents increased as expected be tween 8 weeks and 8 months. As expected, adverse outcomes at 8 weeks were a ssociated with an increased risk of the same outcomes at 8 months. Conclusions The WCHMP is a simple measure of parent-reported health and ill ness which was shown to be reliable and valid with low inter-observer varia tion on initial field-testing. Further validation of the WCHMP, incorporate d into the PHR, in a routine child health surveillance programme demonstrat es its suitability for use in infancy to collect cross-sectional and longit udinal health and morbidity data for research and service planning purposes .