One of the achievements of the small but growing band of public health prevention experts – among them Australia’s own Fiona Stanley – has been to bring the terms and tools of epidemiology, so fundamental to effective strategy and service design, into more common parlance among politicians and policy makers.

The Australian Early Development Index, which Stanley adapted from work in Canada and has since pioneered, is an example of how that campaign of persuasion is progressing. A truly collaborative project involving universities, government, private investors and communities across Australia, it is beginning to bear fruit after three years of trials.

The original Early Development Index (EDI) was the brainchild of Magdalena Janus and the late Dan Offord at the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University in Ontario. Reliability and validity of the instrument were confirmed by several studies on over 16,000 children and it has since been used to assess over quarter of a million young Canadians.

EDI and its Australian successor (AEDI) are practical tools for generating high