Development of the school entrant health questionnaire for assessing primary school children aged 5-7

This article describes the development and pilot testing of the School Entrant Health Questionnaire (SEHQ) for the School Nursing Program in Victoria, Australia to provide a health profile of primary school children. Items likely to discriminate between healthy children and children having health concerns were generated. Domains included were: general health, medications, immunizations, dental health, speech/language, hearing, vision, disabilities, general development, behavior and emotional wellbeing, and family stress. Testing to determine reliability, validity and discriminability was conducted in four phases. The SEHQ was found to have sound reliability and good discriminability between students who had problems and those who did not. Analysis of the SEHQ data leads directly to clinical nursing actions for children identified as having problems in any of the 11 domains. SEHQ is used to reach almost an Australian state population of 5-7 year olds annually, generating a significant data base on this age group.