Management information in the National Health Service: the use of the child-health computer system.

During the last decade, well over half of all the health districts in England and Wales have started to use the national standard child-health computing system, in particular, the vaccination and immunization module. The usefulness of the system in recording data about individual children is well proven, similarly its use as an administration system in scheduling appointments and in routinely producing aggregated statistical information.However, the system also allows for the collection of a variety of data on individual children and indeed their mothers. Such data could be of use in answering management questions in the services such as, \'which children do not attend for immunization\', \'what are their characteristics\' and \'what changes could be made to the services in order to achieve the policy objectives of higher levels of immunization uptake\'. The management initiatives suggested by the Griffiths Report emphasized the use of information in management decision making. The analyses reported in this p