Mattias Wennergren
Doctoral Student
School of Public Health and Community MedicineAbout Mattias Wennergren
Mattias Wennergren is a PhD-student in General medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg with the project Social Epidemiology in Families with Young Children. The thesis encompasses intersectional perspectives on social determinants of health and healthcare utilization for children within the Child Health Services.
Every year around 115 000 children are born in Sweden. Regardless of the context in which a child is born, there will be a large impact on the family. The Swedish Child Health Services was created over 80 years ago to enable early identification and early interventions. Nowadays the National Child Health Services programme contains at least 16 visits. The universal and indicated interventions in the national programme are based on proportionate universalism, which implies that all families should be offered the general parts of the programme, and extra visits or interventions should be adjusted to the needs of the families. If this is the case is not adequately known.
The aim is to investigate how social, economic, and demographic background affects both healthcare utilization and health status in children and caregivers. This doctoral project will use a retrospective register-based approach where data from the medical records in the Child Health Services from 12 regions in Sweden is extracted with an extra selection from Region Västra Götaland. Traditional regression models will be used in combination with different types of multilevel regression and network analysis to be able to investigate the risk of separate variables as well as combinations of variables.