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Children's mission is to provide exceptional clinical care, research new cures and train the next generation of pediatric providers. It's also the hospital's mission to improve the health and well-being of children and families in our community. For Children's, supporting the health of our community means:
• Serving as the community's safety net hospital by caring for all patients in Massachusetts regardless of their ability to pay.
• Focusing on some of the most pressing community health needs for Boston families: asthma, fitness and nutrition, injury prevention and mental health.
• Speaking out as a voice for children through public policy advocacy to change laws, policies or systems that will lead to improvements in the health of children and families.
• Supporting essential community partners throughout Boston to improve children's health. |
By Laurie Cammisa, vice president of Child Advocacy
In difficult economic times like these, at-risk families in Boston's low-income neighborhoods have even greater needs. While Children's Hospital Boston has been striving to reach these families by creating community health programs to tackle health issues that affect their children, the need for such services far outstrips the capacity of any one hospital. Thus, the question is how we can leverage our resources to have broader impact.
Our community health goal over the next 10 years is to effect change on a broader scale—what we're calling systemic change—to improve the health of many more children across the city and state. Going forward, we'll maintain our longstanding partnerships with schools, neighborhood health centers and local organizations, as well as our programs in the focus areas of asthma, injury prevention, obesity and mental health. But we'll also take it a step further by expanding our advocacy efforts to ensure that children and families can access the services and programs they need. By working together, the Office of Child Advocacy and the Department of Government Relations will use the data generated from each of our programs and share what we've found with decision-makers like legislators, insurers and public health advocates to make a case for our proven interventions and approaches.
A good example of this is our Community Asthma Initiative (CAI), the goal of which is to improve the management of asthma and improve quality of life for the children with asthma living in Boston's low-income communities, thereby reducing disparities in childhood asthma. For the past three years, CAI has offered case management, home visits and asthma education to parents so they can better understand environmental triggers, manage their children's medication and monitor their asthma. We also trained staff at health care centers, schools and community organizations to increase their capacity to provide asthma education to families and appropriate physical activities for children with asthma.
It's been remarkably successful: Children enrolled in our program required 68 percent reduction in ED visits and a 77 percent reduction in hospitalizations. This is a huge improvement, but there is even more that we can do help an even greater number of children with asthma throughout the city and state. We have worked with community partners to develop a "business case" which demonstrates the positive results of the program as well, as the money that insurance companies could save by covering this kind of comprehensive case-management program. Hopefully, our continuing work with the insurance companies will result in more of these services being covered by insurers.
Going forward, we'll be increasing our advocacy efforts to create systemic change in other areas too. For example, we've taken the lead in a campaign to reform the state's mental health care system. Using the lessons learned from our Children's Hospital Neighborhood Partnerships program, which provides mental health treatment and prevention services for children in community health centers and schools, we've been able to use our experience to make recommendations and push for needed changes in the mental health care system. Children's has been the lead partner in a statewide coalition of more than 125 members, which worked to successfully pass legislation to reform the mental health care system for children in Massachusetts this year. We're now into phase two of the mental health campaign, during which we'll evaluate the impact of the new legislation, try to identify missing pieces and develop programs to address them.
We'll find other innovative ways to broaden our injury prevention and obesity efforts to connect directly with the people who are delivering care or deciding the policies. For example, we'll work with community health center doctors to identify the best ways to prevent and treat obesity in the future. We can't do this alone. Several departments throughout the hospital, along with external experts from public health and advocacy groups will continue to advise on how programs will be implemented, and together, we'll find the best ways to put our medical expertise to use.
It's exciting that this institution is treating community health as one of the four core missions of the hospital, along with patient care, teaching and research. This serves as a strong reminder that we're not supporting community benefits just because we have to: We want to do it—and we want to do it right.
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