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The Child Growth Foundation is an independent charity and receives no
central government or local government funding. It must provide for
itself. The Foundation supports children, families of children and
adults with growth related problems. It also funds research into
possible solutions to these growth related disorders.
The conditions under the CGF umbrella are:
The CGF was founded when the then
Professor of Child Growth at the Institute of Child Health in London
asked the families of six of his patients if they would be interested
in raising funds for research into growth and growth-related problems.
At the end of the 1970s Government funding for research was getting
harder to obtain and his clinic would have to cut back on its work. To
the fledgling charity it soon became apparent that, in order to raise
substantial quantities of money, it had to educate potential donors in
the importance of growth. Furthermore, it needed to educate health
professionals as well – and doing both was not going to be easy. The
charity decided that, other than being a support group, education and
awareness was the overriding requirement. Hopefully money would flow
as a consequence.
It was to be five years before the
Foundation could boast its first success - the transmission of a
full-length BBC TV drama “Being Normal” on July 27th1983 at
peak viewing. The telephone didn’t stop ringing and the charity knew
it had a mission.
In 1984 it teamed up with the Health
Visitors Association to initiate professional growth awareness courses
and began to market measuring equipment which it discovered the
professionals lacked.
By 1989, with the onset of the
providing/purchasing provisions in the new NHS and its “curtailment”
of some health provision, the Foundation began to fear for the
preservation of growth monitoring. This led to its association with
the drafting of HEALTH FOR ALL CHILDREN, the “gold standard” for UK
child health surveillance, in a bid that it should feature positive
growth monitoring recommendations.
Throughout the 1990’s the Foundation
continued on its mission to raise awareness of the growth conditions
to enable early diagnosis, and providing support. Training of doctors,
nurses and health visitors has become a very significant activity for
the CGF, together with the publication of many papers in the medical
journals. The CGF is invited to attend and participate in many
strategic meetings relating to growth. Lobbying of various government
bodies has proved beneficial and involves occasional meetings at the
House of Commons.
A new challenge now faces the Child
Growth Foundation, Childhood Obesity; already we are becoming a
powerful force relating to the awareness and control of this growing
problem.
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