National health and safety checklist: Development and pilot study

As the number of children attending early care and education programs (ECE) increase each year, more attention is being focused on raising the quality of these programs. Health and safety are key components of quality child care and child care health consultants (CCHCs) are being taught to conduct health and safety assessments, using the California Childcare Health Program (CCHP) Health and Safety Checklist-Revised (2005). They use the assessment to identify health and safety needs and develop interventions with ECE directors and providers. A one-year project was designed to update the CCHP Health and Safety Checklist and conduct a pilot study of the feasibility and ease of administration of the new Checklist in California, North Carolina, and Arizona. Presently, the update of the Checklist is being conducted and is based on the 3rd Edition of Caring for our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards (NHS) for ECE program, 2011. Thirty interdisciplinary health and safety experts and CCHCs will participate in the Delphi technique to identify the key NHS Standards. Their rankings will be based on the relevance of individual standards to the severity and frequency of adverse outcomes for children, relevance to health and safety quality, and susceptibility to change through CCHC interventions. The pilot Checklist will include observable items and be assessed for feasibility and ease of administration. Thirty ECE programs will be enrolled in a pilot study. The summary of the results will include the frequency of standards met and not met across the ECE programs.