Originally a NUM-funded collaborative project, coverCHILD has now established itself permanently as a paediatric research network. At the beginning of September, a coverCHILD project was launched that utilises data from the Research Data Portal for Health (FDPG) . The project "Influence of the pandemic and specific pandemic measures on diagnosis patterns and severity of mental and somatic disorders in children and adolescents: Establishment of a multi-centre surveillance for physical and mental health of children and adolescents within the Network of University Medicine (NUM)" is being set up via the FDPG as a data use project within the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). In the new project, anonymised treatment data from children and adolescents in university hospitals will be analysed decentrally to find out how diagnoses and treatments have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings will help to better understand the health of children and adolescents and develop measures for prevention and early intervention. The coverCHILD research project was first launched in the second funding phase of the NUM and was funded until the end of 2023. The continuation of individual project components such as the KinderRadar (KiRa) dashboard and the KiRa method toolbox could be integrated into other NUM projects.
The coverCHILD community has established a network for child and adolescent psychiatric and paediatric research in order to gain a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability of children and adolescents in global and social crisis situations.