Make the most of your Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit

What is the Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit?

What happens in the first 18 months of life can affect the course of lifelong health, learning and behaviour.

The health care system in Ontario recognizes 18-months as a key developmental milestone for children. The Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit is an opportunity for parents to discuss their child’s development, which includes mental health, with their family physician or health care provider during a longer, in-depth visit.

Why use the Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit Planner?

Eighteen months is a significant milestone in your child’s life and a visit to your family physician or other health care provider at this time is important. To help prepare for this visit, the Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit Planner is a free tool that has been created to help you identify and prioritize questions and concerns for your health care team.

How does the Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit Planner work?

It’s easy! The Visit Planner will guide you through 5 main topic areas that experts in child development have identified as key areas of healthy child development: Physical Health, Safety, Parenting & Healthy Habits, Motor & Language Skills, and Social & Emotional Development.

The Visit Planner should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. For each topic you will be given a list of items from which you can choose one or all to become part of the list of items to discuss at your Enhanced 18-Month Well-Baby Visit. For each topic, you can learn more by clicking on ‘Why Is this Important?’. We also provide a list of suggested questions you may wish to ask your health care team during your visit.

To make sure you leave your visit with your most important questions answered, the Visit Planner helps you prioritize! Arrange the items you selected in whatever order you choose.

Once completed, you can save your unique visit plan and return to it at any time to add notes or change the items you selected. You can download a pdf of your Visit Plan, print it, or save it to your phone or tablet.

We want to hear from you!

We want to know what you think about the Visit Planner. We welcome your feedback to help us continue improving the site. Please contact us at visitplanner@healthhq.ca. There is also a short survey available at the end of your visit. We look forward to hearing from you!

About the Well Visit Planner

The 18-Month Well-Baby Visit Planner content and design is based on the Well Visit Planner® (WVP), which is developed and maintained by the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI). CAHMI is a national U.S. non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting the early and lifelong health of children, youth and families through developing and supporting patient-centered approaches and tools for assessing and improving health care quality. Visit cahmi.org and cycleofengagement.org for more information.

The Well Visit Planner® (WVP) was developed to engage parents as partners to ensure comprehensive high quality well-child care services for children up to 6 years of age. The WVP content is based on recommendations established by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children and Adolescents, Fourth Edition. The tool helps parents to plan for an upcoming well visit and customize the visit to their family's needs by helping to identify and prioritize their needs and concerns ahead of the visit.

The Well Visit Planner® was initially designed and tested through a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Research Program (R40 MC08959).

About DeLI

The 18-month Well-Baby Visit Planner was developed by the Division of e-Learning Innovation (DeLI), an educational research and development group within the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University.

Our development team brings together expertise in instructional design, problem-based learning, evidence-based medicine, multimedia development, computer-based learning technologies, and research and evaluation to create high quality learning resources and leading edge technologies to support e-learning for both health care professionals (machealth.ca) and the public (healthhq.ca).