Dr. Cathal McCrory:

There is a fear of stigmatisation. People are fearful of the word "obese" and parents fear being told that their child is obese. It is sometimes tricky to relay this information to parents. The best way to achieve it is to carry out an annual assessment through schools as part of a public health visit or something similar. At least then we could say there was time to do it in the school environment and that everyone would be measured. If it were done through general practice, some children might attend their general practitioner three or four times per annum, while others might attend only once or not at all, which means that we might not see them and would not know how they were progressing. I work with datasets from other countries. In Portugal, for example, a child is measured every time he or she visits a general practitioner. As a result, the dataset I have for Portugal can show 21 measurements of a child's BMI between birth and two or three years of age.

It is quite phenomenal how much they monitor the children. However, the schools are the way to do this.