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EDI Spring 2016 Newsletter
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Welcome to the Summer 2016 edition of the EDI newsletter
Greetings! The EDI team is happy to be in touch with you again. There have been lots of exciting developments with the EDI over the past year. So many, in fact, that we've decided to dedicate a whole issue of the newsletter to these happenings. Be sure to be on the look out for another newsletter later in the year which will highlight areas in Canada and around the world doing great work with the EDI.

The EDI and the Early Years video

We recently released a new video highlighting the EDI and the importance of the early years.
 
Created with the help of ThinkLink Graphics, the group behind the award-winning Dr. Mike Evans videos, the video explains the basics of the EDI and why its collection is so important.
 
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The EDI and the Early Years
English
The EDI and the Early Years - French
French subtitles

EDI featured in ECRQ Special Issue

In April, a new special issue of Early Childhood Research Quarterly was released, dedicated solely to research involving the EDI.

The articles are available online for free through open access until July 4, 2016. Brief summaries of the articles are also available through the EDI website.

CIHI releases updated cross-country EDI data
The Canadian Institute for Health Information has released an updated version of EDI data across Canada.

The EDI was one of a handful of indicators chosen by CIHI to help Canadians better understand the health system and the health of the population. The EDI is included in a broader set of themes that Canadians told CIHI were important, including: access, quality of care, spending, health promotion and disease prevention, and health outcomes.

CIHI displays how many children are vulnerable in at least one area of development, explaining that this measure is an important indicator of health and well-being in later life. The release displays the data through an interactive map and infographics.

Ontario Poverty Reduction report uses EDI

Ontario has released its Poverty Reduction Strategy 2015 Annual Report, featuring EDI data.

The EDI is used as a key performance indicator for the Poverty Reduction Strategy, along with 10 other measures, including child poverty levels, birth weight, and high school graduation rates, among others.

The report can be read in its entirety here.

The report shows EDI data from 2014-15, compared with previous collections from 2010-12 and 2007-09.

Overall, the percentage of children on track declined slightly from 72.4% in 2011-12 to 70.6% in 2014-15. But the overall percentage does not tell the whole story. Ontario kindergartners improved in Language and Cognitive Development and Communication Skills and General Knowledge, two developmental domains closely related to school readiness.

EDI added to Open Data

The Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services has publicly released a set of EDI data from 2010-2012 aggregated by sex and census division. The data set is available to anyone to download for free provided they abide by the Open Government Licence.

2015 AEDC data released

The Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) results for 2015 have been released.

The AEDC website contains a comprehensive set of resources, including a national report, fact sheets, guides, and more. The site also features an in-depth data explorer.

Recent EDI Conference Presentations

In April 2016, Dr. Magdalena Janus attended the Sparking Solutions conference in Ottawa, Ontario. The conference focused on research for a healthier future. Magdalena gave a presentation titled "Using population-based data on child development to address evidence gaps to inform policy and research", which introduced the CanNECD Study (Canadian Neighbourhoods and Early Child Development, Guhn & Janus, Co-PIs). The study’s protocol has just been published.

The 28th annual McMaster Psychiatry Research Day was held on April 27, 2016 at Mohawk College and featured the theme of prenatal programming, postnatal possibilities. The EDI was well represented at the conference with multiple poster presentations. PDF copies of the EDI's posters are available on our website.
 

From May 30-June 1 the Pathways to Health Equity Conference took place in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Magdalena led a panel discussion on using the EDI to identify and address developmental inequities. The panel discussed the development of a database linking the EDI with demographic, socioeconomic, and policy-related measures, and included Barry Forer and Anita Minh from HELP, UBC as co-presenters. Sarah Taylor from the EDI team also presented a poster on the prevalence of special needs and functional impairment across Canada.

A few weeks later the Canadian Public Health Association held Public Health 2016 in Toronto, Ontario. Simon Webb represented the EDI team and presented a poster examining Canadian socioeconomic indices and their relationship to the EDI. A PDF of the poster is available online.

Recent EDI Publications

In addition to the special issue of ECRQ, there have been several recently published studies using EDI data.

Bell, M. F., Bayliss, D. M., Glauert, R., Harrison, A., & Ohan, J. L. (2016). Chronic illness and developmental vulnerability at school entry. Pediatrics, 137, 1-9. doi: 10.1542/peds.2015-2475

Brinkman, S. A, Kinnell, A., Maika, A., Hasan, A., Jung, H., & Pradhan, M. (2016). Validity and reliability of the Early Development Instrument in Indonesia. Child Indicators Research, 1-22. doi: 10.1007/s12187-016-9372-4

Curtin, M., Browne, J., Staines, A., & Perry, I. J. (2016). The Early Development Instrument: An evaluation of its five domains using Rasch analysis. BMC Pediatrics, 16, 1-14. doi: 10.1186/s12887-016-0543-8

Guhn, M., Janus, M., Enns, J., Brownell, M., Forer, B, Duku, E., ... & Raos, R. (2016). Examining the social determinants of children's developmental health: Protocol for building a pan-Canadian population-based monitoring system for early childhood development. BMJ Open, 6, 1-9. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012020

McKeown, K., Haase, T., & Pratschke, J. (2015). Determinants of child outcomes in a cohort of children in the Free Pre-School Year in Ireland, 2012/2013. Irish Educational Studies, 34, 245-263. doi: 10.1080/03323315.2015.1065430

O’Leary, J. D., Janus, M., Duku, E., Wijeysundera, D. N., To, T., Ping, L.,… & Crawford, M. W. (In press). A population-based study evaluating the association between surgery in early life and child development at primary school entry. Anesthesiology.

Razaz, N., Joseph, K. S., Boyce, W. T., Guhn, M., Forer, B., Carruthers, R., ... & Tremlett, H. (2015). Children of chronically ill parents: Relationship between parental multiple sclerosis and childhood developmental health. Multiple Sclerosis Journal, 1-11. doi: 10.1177/1352458515621624

Tso, W., Rao, N., Jiang, F. Li, A. M., Lee, S., Ho, F. K., ... & Ip, P. (2016). Sleep duration and school readiness of Chinese preschool children. The Journal of Pediatrics, 169, 266-271. doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2015.10.064
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