All children in England should receive a health review at 2–21/2 years, with the Ages and Stages Questionnaire third edition (ASQ-3) used to collect public health surveillance data on child development. However, practitioners also value tools that assess individual children’s development—consistent with ASQ-3’s original purpose. Concerns about licensing costs and barriers to digitalisation have prompted interest in alternative tools to the ASQ-3 in England.

To inform policy, we conducted a rapid scoping review following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines to identify tools that can measure or assess early child development.

Searched PubMed, PsycINFO and Web of Science from January 2012 to November 2022, with targeted search update November 2024.

We included English-language studies published after January 2012 that described or evaluated tools in English which could measure or assess early child development in children

We extracted key features and reliability, validity, sensitivity and specificity of tools which could feasibly be implemented at the 2–21/2-year review (eg, including multiple age versions and

We identified 112 unique publications describing 34 tools; six met our feasibility criteria for the 2–21/2-year review (reported in 53 studies). Only ASQ-3 and CREDI offer domain-specific scoring—a government priority. ASQ-3 moderately detects mild delays and performs better for severe delays in at-risk groups. Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) was designed for public health surveillance, and we do not yet know how it performs for individual assessment.

ASQ-3 and CREDI are most promising for use at the 2–21/2-year review. However, we lack UK-based validation and norming studies, even for ASQ-3. Ultimately, careful implementation and integration into existing systems will determine a tool’s value for identifying developmental needs, supporting families and producing high quality data for public health surveillance.

To assess the impact of opening a large community-based asynchronous review ophthalmic clinic on attendance delays among patients with stable chronic eye disease attending a London teaching eye hospital network.

Interrupted time-series analysis of routine electronic health records of appointment attendances.

A large eye hospital network with facilities across London, UK, between June 2018 and April 2023.

We analysed 69 257 attendances from 39 357 patients, with glaucoma and medical retina accounting for 62% (n=42 982) and 38% (n=26 275) of visits, respectively. Patients over 65 made up 54% (n=37 824) of attendances, while 53% (n=37 014) were from the more deprived half of the population, and 51% (n=35 048) were males.

An asynchronous review clinic opened in a shopping centre in London, in autumn 2021, following the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020.

Average attendance delays (days), calculated as the difference between follow-up attendance date and the latest clinically appropriate date determined at the preceding attendance.

Pre-COVID-19, attendance delays for chronic eye disease monitoring were increasing by 0.9 days per week (95% CI, 0.8 to 0.9) on average, worsening to 2.0 days per week (95% CI, 2.0 to 2.0) after the first COVID-19 national lockdown, mid-March 2020. Opening the asynchronous review clinic increased appointment capacity, with delays decreasing on average by 8.1 days per week (95% CI, 8.1 to 8.2) shortly after opening. The rate of decrease slowed to 0.3 days per week (95% CI, 0.3 to 0.3) after 5 months. We found no significant differences in average attendance delays by age, gender or level of deprivation.

The asynchronous review clinic significantly reduced attendance delays across the hospital network, addressing pre-existing backlog for stable chronic eye diseases. The reduction appeared to be maintained after the initial backlog had been cleared.