Starting right – Children and young people in Agder

About the project

The project is about children and young people having the best possible health in their everyday lives and enabling public health nurses at public health centres and schools to provide care on the basis of the best available knowledge in order to better help everyone. The goal of the research project ‘Starting right is to gain more knowledge about how children and young people in Agder are doing, and to improve the services available to them.

Starting right aims to:

• Provide knowledge-based assessments of children and young people's growth, development, mental health and quality of life for use by service providers as decision support while ensuring that this knowledge is assembled and used in the best interests of the child.
• Survey the distribution of height/weight, general and social emotional development, mental health and quality of life in the child and adolescent population.
• Investigate the experiences of public health nurses, parents, children and young people with the use of structured and digital mapping tools.
• Investigate how these tools affect work processes and assessments and contribute to early knowledge-based intervention and interaction.
• Inform the systematic development of services and measures based on digital innovation and the application of structured and quality data.

The project with UiA as a partner started in the period 2018-2021 with NOK 3 million from Agder Regional Research Fund. The information on this page is about the project in 2020-2024.