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Curriculum standards

Knowledge guides

LG14: Child population health

Epidemiology, pathophysiology, and clinical sciences

Advanced Trainees will have in-depth knowledge of the topics listed under each clinical sciences heading.

For the statistical and epidemiological concepts listed, trainees should be able to describe the underlying rationale, the indications for using one test or method over another, and the calculations required to generate descriptive statistics.

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Investigations, procedures, and clinical assessment tools

Advanced Trainees will know the scientific foundation of each investigation and procedure, including relevant anatomy and physiology. They will be able to interpret the reported results of each investigation or procedure.

Advanced Trainees will know how to explain the investigation or procedure to patients, families, and carers, and be able to explain procedural risk and obtain informed consent where applicable

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Important specific issues

Advanced Trainees will identify important specialty-specific issues and the impact of these on diagnosis, management and outcomes.

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  • Outline principles of epidemiology and biostatistics, including descriptive and comparative statistics
  • Outline common research methods and designs, including study types (e.g., clinical, intervention, observational, cohort, cross-sectional, longitudinal, qualitative).
  • Describe process and application of child health screening and surveillance
  • Describe the difference between service monitoring, evaluation, and research
  • Explain epidemiology in terms of outcome and risk factor frequency and burden, including causation
  • Identification of population sub-groups, according to:
    • age
    • disability
    • ethnicity, race, culture
    • gender identity and gender expression
    • regional and rural settings
    • sexual preference
    • socioeconomic status
    • those with exposure to violence, abuse and neglect
  • Indigenous data sovereignty and shared access to data and information at a regional level
  • Outline common research methods and study designs used in child health research, including:
    • Quantative studies
      • Interventional studies
      • Observational studies
      • Studies of diagnostic tests
      • Systematics reviews and meta-analyses
      • Qualitative studies
  • Common statistical methods and terms, such as:
    • types of data
    • descriptive and inferential statistics
    • tests of significance/confidence intervals
    • measures of association/effect sizes
  • Common study problems and flaws, such as:
    • measurement limitations and generalisability
    • statistical concerns:
      • power
      • sample size
    • types of bias
  • Measures of deprivation and socioeconomic status used in their community, regional, state, and/or national level for population-health reporting and research
  • Principles and methods for evaluating population health initiatives
  • Awareness of health economics for cost-effective analyses
  • Principles and methods for service evaluation
  • Principles of continuous quality improvement and clinical governance
  • Awareness of the utility of health needs assessments for generating population health insights
  • Awareness of relevant cultural models of health
Health equity
  • Describe how various preventable or modifiable factors put specific population sub-groups at a relative disadvantage or advantage with respect to child health, developmental, or later life outcomes, including:
    • Socioeconomic status, including poverty
    • Education, including parental education
    • Indigenous status (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori)
    • Ethnic minority status (e.g., Pacific)
    • Disability
    • LGBQTIA+
    • Migrant, refugee, asylum status
    • Rural and geographically remote
  • Describe differences in child health and developmental outcomes between population subgroups at the local, regional, and national level, with awareness of relevant data sources and their limitations
  • Child health priorities locally, nationally, and globally
  • Describe strategies, interventions for reducing health inequities
  • Describe the principles of syndemic theory, including the clustering of suboptimal health outcomes and interaction with adversity
  • Describe the principles of intersectionality, including the intersection of identities (e.g., disabled, ethnic, and gender) to uniquely influence health outcomes
  • Analyse interventions and policies with respect to their impacts on health equity
Life course epidemiology
  • Describe the life course model and explain factors that influence child health, development, and wellbeing, including:
    • Socioeconomic status, including low income and poverty
    • Early life experiences including adverse and positive childhood experiences, trauma, perinatal adverse factors
    • Biological embedding and gene-environment interactions
    • Critical and sensitive periods of development
    • Ecological framework for child development
    • Developmental trajectories
    • Cumulative risk and resilience over time
    • Intergenerational factors
  • Describe typical cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioural capabilities of infants, children and young people at different stages of development
  • Outline key findings of relevant longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of infants, children, and young people, including their strengths and limitations and implications for local practice
  • Describe the benefits of investing in infants, children, and young people with reference to relevant literature
Social determinants of health
  • Describe the social determinants of health model and explain how broad factors such as income, education, housing, and neighbourhoods influence child health, development, and wellbeing:
    • Socioeconomic status, including low income and poverty
    • Family mental illness,
    • Trauma, abuse and neglect, adverse and positive childhood experiences
    • Educational experiences
    • Rural and remote settings
    • Cultural dislocation and historic factors including colonisation and experiences of discrimination
    • Environmental influences and exposures
  • Describe factors that limit access to health care
  • Describe strategies for promoting of child wellbeing and optimal developmental at a population health level
  • Awareness of global and planetary health concepts and impacts on children and young people, including impacts of climate change to global child health
  • Awareness of the broad impact of societal crises on children
Health promotion
  • Describe the evidence base for the promotion of optimal child health, development, and wellbeing
  • Describe the evidence base for strengthening communities through promoting health, development, and wellbeing of infants, children, young people and their families
  • Describe relevant cultural models of health (e.g., Te Whare Tapa Wha for Māori)
  • Discuss modifiable risk factors and describe strategies to address these, including:
    • antenatal exposures, including drug and alcohol
    • breastfeeding
    • immunisation status
    • injury
    • obesity
Health policy, programmes, planning and service improvement
  • Describe the broad mechanisms for achieving change in legislation, policies, procedures and protocols to promote child health, development, and wellbeing at the population level
  • Awareness of existing policies that have relevance for child health and development, including parental leave, breast feeding, economic, and education policies
  • Awareness of various funding models for programmes relevant to child health and development
  • Awareness of principles and methods for service evaluation
  • Differentiate between service monitoring, evaluation, and research
  • Awareness of evidence-based factors that produce changes in clinical behaviour or managerial practice
  • Describe principles of quality improvement, such as:
    • clinical audit processes
    • lean thinking methodology
    • quality cycle
    • systems thinking
  • Explain the importance of consumer, stakeholder, and lived experience input into health service design, delivery, and evaluation
Child health and development screening and surveillance
  • Describe child health and development screening programmes at the community, regional, state, and national level
  • Explain the advantages and disadvantages of targetted and universal screening programmes
  • Describe challenges for screening programmes and identify strategies for overcoming barriers to access
  • Describe measures of test performance for screening programmes, including:
    • sensitivity and specificity
    • negative and positive predictive values
    • area under the curve
    • reliability
  • Describe the characteristics of child health surveillance programmes relevant to child population health in their local setting, including notifiable disease reporting, case definitions, and uses of surveillance data.
Environmental epidemiology
  • Describe principles of exposure assessment with relevance to child health and development, including:
    • exposure versus dose
    • group-level versus individual level
    • objective
    • subjective
  • Describe study designs and analytic tools, including:
    • ecologic studies
    • Poisson regression for modelling counts or rates of events
    • spatial mapping, e.g. geographic information systems (GIS)
    • special considerations for confounding, clusteringtime-series analyses