Introduction and guidance
Introduction
This free course, Physical and mental health for young children, lasts 24 hours, with 8 ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:
- Session 1: Promoting the health of all children
- Session 2: Patterns in young children’s health
- Session 3: The benefits of promoting children’s health
- Session 4: Preventable communicable and non-communicable health conditions
- Session 5: Policies and curricula: global and national initiatives to promote babies and children’s health
- Session 6: Introducing the Toolkit to identifying health priorities
- Session 7: Professionals and parents working together
- Session 8: Challenges and solutions to working together to promote children’s health

Transcript: Video 1 Introduction to the course
Jackie Musgrave:
Hello. I’m Jackie Musgrave, and I’m one of the co-authors of this course. Even though I’ve been in education for many years, I still align with being a nurse, and specifically with being a sick children’s nurse. I did two months placement at a paediatric hospital as part of my general training, and I met many children who spent huge chunks of time in the hospital, often on their own, sometimes in pain, away from their family, and they were often very bored.
I often used to wonder what the impact was on them in the long term. I only have to listen to a song from that era to be transported back, remembering all of those children. This experience made me develop a lifelong interest in children’s health and well-being. And then when I moved into education, I was asked to teach a child health module.
This was with experienced practitioners who were doing their foundation degree. And they had developed ways that made the environment as inclusive as possible for children with chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, asthma or eczema. I learned so much from them, and as a consequence, I chose the area of looking at how they supported children’s health for my doctoral research.
Children's health is not as good as it could be or as good as they deserve. They have a right to good health. And it is up to the adults in their lives to do what they can to promote good health for children.
This course brings together contemporary research and current knowledge about children’s health, and it is aimed at parents, professionals and educators. There are eight sessions in this course, and they’re approximately three hours each. We have commissioned original audio and visual resources to capture the wisdom of practitioners and other professionals who work in children’s services.
There are activities that will help to deepen your knowledge and encourage you to consider how you can support children’s health. We consider the needs of all children, babies, young children, those with disabilities, those with chronic ongoing conditions.
In Session 1 we set the scene by looking at what we mean by health. You'll meet Oscar, an eight-year-old, who will describe what health means to him.
In Session 2, we'll look at the historical perspective of child health, because it's really important to understand where we were in order to understand why we are where we are now.
In Session 3, we'll look at health promotion in relation to babies and young children.
And in Session 4, we'll look in greater depth at communicable and non-communicable conditions that are preventable.
And in Session 5, we'll examine policy and initiatives that can promote and support children's health, not just from England, from around the four countries of the UK, and also across the world.
Session 6 will focus on child health promotion, and we'll be looking at the toolkit and how this can help to promote children's health.
Session 7 will look at specific ways of working with parents and professionals.
And the final session will look at challenges and solutions.
The course will give you knowledge and resources to help you work towards ways of supporting and promoting children's health.
Thank you very much for registering for the course, and I hope you enjoy it.
Children across the world are precious, and it is up to the adults in their lives to do all they can to support and promote their health so that they can live the best life possible. However, the health of babies and young children is at a critical point; increased levels of poor mental health, high levels of childhood obesity and concerns about infectious diseases all make for a worrying picture of the state of our children’s health. However, there is a great deal that adults who care for and educate babies and young children can do to support and promote good health in practical and low-cost ways. This free course will increase your knowledge and skills in showing you ways that adults, both parents and professionals, can play an active role in supporting and promoting good health in babies and young children.
Learning outcomes
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- explain why health promotion is important for babies and children
- explore the contemporary conditions affecting babies and children’s mental and physical health
- understand how early childhood pre-school settings can work with professionals and parents to promote children’s health
- appreciate the factors that can impact on babies’ and children’s mental and physical health
- identify and plan interventions to improve the health of babies and children.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page, to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
There are text boxes within the activities for you to make notes where it would be helpful. This saves for you to refer back to, and only you can access these notes, no one else is able to see them. Alternatively, you are welcome to make notes offline instead, for example in a notebook.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.
Get started with Session 1.