Child health care uptake among low‐income and immigrant families in a Swedish county

Abstract

To study the uptake of child health care among low-income and immigrant families in the county of Uppsala, Sweden, to investigate whether these families received extra attention as proposed in the Swedish Child Health Services (CHS) state-of-the-art consensus document from the year 2000. Data were collected for 25,024 infants born 1998-2006 from the database of statistics of the Child Health Care Unit in Uppsala and socio-demographic indicators from Swedish national registers. Disposable income was divided into quartiles. Country of birth of the mother was categorized into four regions with two subgroups each, mothers with or without a Swedish-born partner. Analysis was conducted by Cox regression and linear regression models. Small differences between Swedish vs. immigrant and high vs. low-income families were detected. Low-income mothers (RR 0.78) as well as mothers born in all country of birth regions with an immigrant partner (RR 0.28-0.95) had lower rates of participation in parental groups. The CHS provided basic child health care to almost all infants including children in immigrant and low-income Swedish families. However, the results did not indicate that disadvantaged families received the extra attention proposed in the consensus document.