Needs of special groups: children

Abstract

Contact with primary health care is a common experience in childhood. Over the course of one year, most children are taken to primary care health services by their parents. The majority of consultations are for physical health problems, but a proportion are for psychological or developmental problems and, as well as referring to child psychiatric and related services when necessary, attending to psychological and social issues is one of the tasks of the general practitioner. Epidemiological work in child psychiatry has underlined how important it is that primary care services attend to the psychiatric needs of children. Whilst in the general population psychiatric disorders are present in about one in ten children, the majority of disturbed children are not under psychiatric care. The more severely affected children are especially likely to be referred to psychiatric services. The milder nature of the dif® culties of many children seen in general practice makes it plausible that they will respond to less sophisticated interventions in the primary care setting than those provided in specialist child mental health services.