Wednesday, June 16th & Thursday, June 17th, 2010
Hamilton Convention Centre Hamilton, ON, Canada
Presented by the Offord Centre for Child Studies, McMaster University along with the Council for Early Child Development & the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
Meeting to Promote Monitoring and Advancement of Healthy Early Child Development
It has been ten years since Dan Offord and Magdalena Janus designed the Early Development Instrument (EDI) - a tool to measure children’s developmental health at school entry. Now the Canadian EDI database reaches over half a million kindergarten children, and is used or modified for use in over a dozen countries around the world.
A number of international organizations have recognized the need to improve the quality and comparability of global child development indicators. Dr. Magdalena Janus and colleagues including Clyde Hertzman, Fraser Mustard (Canada), Sally Brinkman (Australia) and Neal Halfon (USA) are working with international organizations like World Bank, UNICEF and WHO towards this goal utilizing the experience gained through the EDI studies.
Researchers and policy-makers working on these projects come from many diverse backgrounds including: child psychology, pediatrics, epidemiology, statistics, public health, sociology, geography, education. They also come from many countries such as Kosovo, Jamaica, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Indonesia, the Philippines and Jordan. Many of them will be in attendance to bring us up-to-date on the state of early child development monitoring and health promotion in both developing and developed countries, and to demonstrate now such monitoring can promote early child development.
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Sir Michael Marmot
Former Chair of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, he is Director of the International Institute for Society and Health, and Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College, London. In 2000 he was knighted for services to epidemiology and understanding health inequalities.
The contributions of Sir Michael Marmot and Dr. Dan Offord are inextricably linked, both here in Canada and internationally. In the 1980s, Sir Michael’s work demonstrated the importance of social gradients in health. This inspired the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIfAR) to create a series of programs that have searched for early human developmental origins of the gradient. Dr. Offord, as key member of the Human Development Program in CIfAR, conceived of the Early Development Instrument (EDI) as a tool that could allow these processes to be readily understood in their broader social context, and one that could be used to advocate for changes in the allocation of resources to early childhood. The success of the EDI, in turn, became a key source of information for Sir Michael’s WHO Commission which has been extraordinarily influential around the world in putting the evidence about early child development and inequity at the centre of policy discussions. Sir Michael was able to clearly document, at the level of the population, how the social environment produces gradients in development in the early years, thus providing clues as to how those gradients might be eliminated, leading to ‘equity from the start’. |
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