Preserving children's health: search for the ways of solving relevant issues

Changed social reality, caused by the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), made attention to population’s health, its risks, and defining factors relevant. Nowadays, an individual’s personal responsibility for own health and coherence of various social institutions’ activities in the formation of children’s health are of particular importance. The article is devoted to an analysis of children’s health and search for the ways of its improvement. The authors explore the issues of availability and quality of medical services, safeguard of children’s health and discuss the barriers to inter-institutional cooperationin this field, as well as ways of overcoming them. To achieve these objectives, we used quantitative and qualitative sociological methods: a sociological survey of families with children aged 3-17 years, monitoring observation of cohorts of families with children, focus group studies of parents of children aged 3-17 years, an expert survey of specialists of the regional health system and members of government authorities. The authors reveal several issues: decline of children’s health potential in growing; insufficient awareness of parents about the state, forms, and methods of preserving and strengthening children’s health, discrepancy between parents’ ideas about their own competence in this matter with reality; lack of narrow-profile specialists in children’s medical institutions; absence of medical workers among full-time staff of educational organizations; queues and complexity of making appointments with specialists; low availability of free and high cost of paid medical services; insufficient information interaction between medical, educational organizations and parents in the prevention of diseases; lack of parents’ knowledge of full information about objectives of professional examinations and insufficient awareness of the importance of further actions to restore and strengthen health of children. Based on the analysis, we stated the areas of solving these problems. They may include the development and implementation of specific management tools to preserve children’s health potential.