Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESUse of Health and School-Based Services in Australia by Young People With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Section snippets
Participants
The participants were 398 children of the 3,597 children aged 6 to 17 years who were recruited for the Child and Adolescent Component of the National Survey of Mental Health and Well-Being in Australia and who met DSM-IV symptom criteria for ADHD. The survey methodology has been described in detail elsewhere (Sawyer et al., 2000). In brief, the survey used a multistage probability sample of 4,509 households to select a representative sample of Australian children aged 4 to 17 years (for
Characteristics of Children
The characteristics of children with each ADHD subtype are shown in Table 1. Overall, 70.1% were males, 64.6% were aged 6 to 11 years, and 25.4% lived in single-parent families. Compared with other children in the survey, children with ADHD symptomatology were significantly younger (ADHD = 10.2 years, non-ADHD = 11.6 years, t = 7.8, df = 1,3559, p < .001), more frequently male (ADHD = 70%, non-ADHD = 47%; χ2 = 73.9, df = 1, p < .001), and more often living in single-parent households (ADHD =
DISCUSSION
Only a minority of children with ADHD symptoms had received help from professional services during the 6 months before the survey. Family doctors and pediatricians played a key role in the provision of these services. Dulcan et al. (1990) have drawn attention to the role of pediatricians as gatekeepers to mental health services in the United States. In other countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, family doctors provide primary health care for children, with pediatricians having a
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Cited by (0)
This work was funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care and supported by a national collaborating group of researchers in Australia. The authors thank Jo Carbone for her help with data analysis.