Welcome to Kaleidoscope - Children's Health Network

That Scottish ogre with attitude, Shrek, told me that monsters are like onions, not because they are small but because they have many layers.  Now, children are more beautiful than monsters both internally and externally. They are also made of many layers and come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

It is important for caring and competent health professionals to recognise this.  We recognise that children have hearts and bones and brains so we need services with cardiologists, orthopaedic surgeons and neurologists.

But that's not enough because it's not just the organs that make a child or young person beautiful. It's about who they are, where they come from, and where they are going. 

Any learning organisation knows that to grow and learn as adults we need a healthy social and emotional environment.  The physical function of our body is not isolated from our emotional and social well-being.   So it is with children, each aspect of these areas, their physical body, their development and mental well-being and their family life needs attention to produce healthy children and young people. 

So if we as a group of committed caring health professionals are going to ensure that our Health Service is really a "health" service, it is not sufficient to deliver care to individual bits of the child. It's important that all the doctors, nurses and therapists work together as a team.

Traditionally, services have been hospital-based and separate from the community services or separated by reason of organ specialty.  But that's not what creates a healthy child and family.  If we accept that healthcare for children and young people means services for the body, the mind and the family then we should take a view, perhaps even a "Kaleidoscopic" view, that these services should be networked together.

And that's why we've developed Kaleidoscope, the Children's Health Network. The service is designed to help make the journey through the health system easier for children and families; to encourage health professionals across sites to work together; to develop polices and processes to support quality health care, to engineer best practice and to minimise the risk of things going wrong.

With its bright colours and rapidly changing patterns, a kaleidoscope captures the essence of childhood. As a health service, Kaleidoscope is about supporting the health needs of children as they blossom from toddlers to teenagers. It's also about working in partnership with the community for the wellbeing of all children.

Professor Trish Davidson
Director of Children, Young People and Families