Thousands of babies miss out on developmental health checks, HSE figures show

In 2019, public health nurses screened 53,524 infants, while last year the figure fell to just 28,184.

Thousands of newborn babies missed out on 'core' developmental health checks last year, as public health nurses were redeployed to Covid-19 work.

Public health nurses run developmental health screening programmes for infants from birth to 12 months of age. But new HSE figures indicate many babies missed out on such checks because of the suspension of “non-essential clinical work” in March of last year and the redeployment of staff.