SURVEILLANCE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF BRAZIL’S SITUATION

OBJECTIVE: To describe Brazil’s historical background with regard to child development surveillance and perform a systematic review of studies published on surveillance records of child development within Child Health Handbooks. DATA SOURCES: A literature review was conducted in April of 2016 in the following electronic databases: Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS), the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), and the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (Medline). The search did not have any language or publication period restrictions, and included the bibliographic references of the selected articles. The keywords “child development and child health records,” and “child development and child health handbook” were applied. Articles were included that were original and that evaluated the use of child development surveillance tools in Brazil. Publications that were not original were excluded. The articles were selected first based on their title, then their abstracts, and finally a thorough reading. DATA SYNTHESIS: The recommendation to support child development surveillance has been occurring since 1984. In 1995, developmental milestones were included in the Child’s Health Handbook, and in 2004 they became normative acts for surveillance, which should be carried out using this booklet. In the systematic review, six articles were selected in which the prevalence of child development surveillance recording ranged from 4.6 to 30.4%. This variation was due to different criteria and sample sizes as well as different methodologies employed to analyze the adequacy of filling out the handbook. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the fact that the Brazilian Ministry of Health formalized child development surveillance 32 years ago, the act of recording the surveillance in the Child Health Handbook is still deficient and irregular.