England | RCPCH

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State of Child Health 2026: Emotional health and wellbeing

This is a child and young person-led indicator, selected through a UK-wide engagement and ballot process and further developed with children and young people across the UK to reflect what emotional health and wellbeing support should look like and how it should be measured.

Children and young people's voice

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State of Child Health 2026: Early childhood development

This indicator assesses whether children have met the expected developmental outcomes as they enter primary school. It provides an indication of their overall health and wellbeing at a key milestone, and whether children have received access to the support they needed to ensure the best start in lif...

Infant health

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State of Child Health 2026: Headline recommendations

Our 12 indicators provide a practical framework for current and future governments to track and measure progress on children’s health outcomes. We make three key recommendations: improve data, set national targets and invest in children’s health.

Health policy

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State of Child Health 2026: Mental health

This indicator explores the prevalence of mental health conditions in children and young people. Comparisons across the UK are challenging due to the lack of routine, standardised data collection that enables consistent tracking of trends over time.

Mental health

Health policy

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State of Child Health 2026: Injuries

This indicator measures the rate of emergency hospital admissions due to injury in children per 1,000 population in England, Scotland and Wales. There are no comparable data available for Northern Ireland. Data on emergency admissions by injury cause is not readily available. Scotland and Wales...

Emergency medicine

Ambulance services

Health policy

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State of Child Health 2026: Child mortality

This indicator examines child mortality rates across the UK, measured as the age-standardised rate of death from all causes among children and young people aged 1–17 years per 100,000 population.

Health policy

Public health

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State of Child Health 2026: Asthma

This indicator measures the rate of emergency admissions to hospital due to asthma in children and young people in Scotland and England, measured per 100,000 population. There are no comparable data available for Wales and Northern Ireland.

Community child health

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State of Child Health 2026: Substance misuse

This indicator analyses trends in drug and alcohol use among young people. However, there are current limitations to this indicator, as there is no shared, standardised measure of substance misuse prevalence across the nations.

Health policy

Alcohol

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State of Child Health 2026: Infant mortality

Infant mortality is defined as the death of a child under the age of one year and is measured as deaths per 1,000 live births. This includes the neonatal (first 28 days) and post-neonatal (28 days to 1 year) periods.

Child and adolescent mortality

Health policy

Infant health

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State of Child Health 2026: Immunisations

This indicator examines the rates of uptake of two doses of the MMR vaccine by age 5 and uptake of the 6-in-1 vaccine by 12 months in each of the four nations and how those have changed over time, as a proxy for vaccination uptake in general.

Immunology

Vaccination