Early-life interventions carry the largest potential for improving long-term health,
opportunity, and equity. Using the Sprint grant we have established a transdisciplinary consortium with health sciences, policy and management, and economics expertise and delivered a common research agenda. We are now initiating projects addressing key aspects of this agenda and applying for grants to support its goals and ambitions. Our agenda focuses on identification and impact assessment of existing early-life interventions, development and testing of novel interventions, and development of an overall impact assessment model.

A key goal in health care and policy is to optimize health and economic outcomes across the life course. Many exposures and experiences determining such outcomes are rooted in early life, more specifically in the first 1000 days (i.e. starting from conception). Optimizing opportunity for every individual from the very beginning has significant, yet largely unmet, potential to promote and equalize health capital, as illustrated by the famous Heckman Curve by economics professor and Nobel Prize laureate James Heckman (Figure below).

Recognizing the significance but also the complexity of this issue, we are determined to take up the challenge of providing answers. Our key objective is to build a transdisciplinary consortium integrating expertise from healthcare, public health, epidemiology, health policy and management, economics, and econometrics, and to initiate a joint research programme on this topic.

Our short-term objectives are:

1. Identify and harness opportunities for quantifying the impact of existing and future policy interventions in early life on long-term health, economic, and equity outcomes using robust causal inference approaches;
2. Develop and prospectively test novel early-life interventions to improve health, economic, and equity outcomes across the life course; and
3. Develop a model integrating existing knowledge and insights from objectives #1&2 to allow estimation of the long-term health, economic, and equity impact of (future) early-life interventions.

Consortium established

We established a highly transdisciplinary and cross-institutional consortium which continues to expand. A research agenda is created and we formed topic groups which work on specific aspects of the agenda. These groups will assess return-on-investment of early-life interventions in the Netherlands. This includes approaches using routine data linkages at the national level. One of our topic groups developed an intervention using unconditional cash transfers and debt relief to be embedded within the Mothers of Rotterdam (MvR) municipal programme. A grant application was submitted to ZonMw to support this work.

We have extended the consortium with highly relevant partners to complement expertise;

• University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam
• Erasmus School of Economics
• Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management
• Ministry of Health
• Nederlands Centrum Jeugdgezondheid (NCJ)
• National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM)
• Technical University Delft

 The future of the consortium

The consortium is now embedded within the national strategic Public Private Partnership Solid Start. We have secured follow-on grants to support overall work in the consortium for the coming year. Lastly, we are working on key challenges to sustain funding to support the work and to meet up to the high expectations of stakeholders interested in the work.

Click here for more information about the consortium.