Dear colleague,

We are seeking your expertise for reviewing the WHO Draft Pocket Book for Primary Health Care for Children and Adolescents in the European Region.

The Pocket Book of Primary Health Care for Children and Adolescents aims at compiling guidance in a user-friendly format for primary healthcare provider(s) incl. protocol/algorithms for this age group. It is covering additional topics beyond those of the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) which WHO has been promoting over the past decades. It is based on existing evidence-based guidelines and tools with relevance to the WHO European Region. An adaptation may follow to allow for its global use.  It is meant to be a job aid,  NOT a textbook, following the same format as the very successful WHO Pocket Book of Hospital care for children, and will exist in electronic format.

Regional stakeholders of WHO in the European region agreed on the importance of preparing technical guidelines for practitioners working with children and adolescents at primary health care level (family doctors, general practitioners, paediatricians, nurses, feldshers working as individuals or in teams) based on existing WHO guidance but adapted to meet the requirements, realities and needs of the European region. These are envisioned to form the basis for standards of care in universal health coverage and benefits packages for health insurance, thus being tightly incorporated into the health system at large.

Criteria for inclusion of topics were the following:

• Epidemiologic criterion: major causes of morbidity and mortality in children (0-18) (including adolescents)
• Frequent presenting complaints to ensure relevance and usefulness for primary care providers
• Rarer but important conditions responsible for a significant loss of healthy life years, such as childhood cancer or chronic conditions

Over the past 12 months experts have developed draft chapters based on WHO guidelines and best available evidence.

This draft Pocket book is now undergoing this external peer review to which you are invited to contribute to ensure its technical accuracy as well as its usefulness to the end-user. This is a DRAFT document and thus has not undergone editing and layout to date. After the external peer review the draft will be professionally edited, so please do not correct spelling or wording (unless it makes the content unclear). The same holds for the layout, drawings and illustrations which are also being professionally designed.

You are invited to review individual chapters, or the entire draft based on your preference and areas of expertise.

We would be very grateful if you would be willing to fill in the questionnaire with your comments and insights before August 15^th  to ensure that your feedback is captured and addressed in the next round of revisions. You can do so anonymously, but if you provide your name and affiliation, your contribution will be acknowledged in the final book. 

 You can access the Questionnaire and the draft Pocket Book through the following link https://datacol.euro.who.int/forms/358964?newtest=Y&lang=en

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at

CAHsurvey2019@who.int.

Thank you very much for your collaboration!

Best wishes

Martin

Dr. Martin Weber, MD, PhD, DTM&H
Programme Manager, Child and Adolescent Health
WHO Regional Office for Europe
Marmorvej 51
2100 Copenhagen
Denmark

e-mail weberm@who.int
Telephone +454533 5000 (switch board)
Telephone direct +454533 6975