Healthy Steps for Young ChildrenSM

E-UPDATE

October 2006 Issue
(Printable Version)

Stories


Rocking Horse Center Receives National Award

Rocking Horse Center, a Healthy Steps site in Springfield, Ohio, has been awarded the prestigious 2006 Health Care Delivery award by the Ambulatory Pediatric Association. The award letter to Jim Duffee, the pediatrician who founded and leads Rocking Horse, applauds “…the commitment of Rocking Horse to meeting the needs of children and families through the diverse and innovative services offered as well as through extensive community collaborations.”

Rocking Horse Center serves more that 9,000 mostly low-income children, who generate nearly 25,000 visits annually. Services include enhanced, on-site developmental and mental health care through Healthy Steps for Young Children, child advocacy for abused children, care coordination for children with special health care needs, community outreach, participation in a regional practice-based research network, and community pediatrics training for students and residents.

Congratulations to all at Rocking Horse Center!!

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Website Focuses on Child Development and Behavior

A helpful, easy-to-use website, www.dbpeds.org, is available for professionals in the medical setting interested in child development and behavior. For Healthy Steps practitioners, this site may be especially useful because of its strong focus on surveillance, early identification of delay, and developmental screening. The site has also recently introduced Web-based Discussion Forums.

Also, www.dbpeds.org now includes a Primary Care discussion that is monitored by experienced clinicians. For primary and specialty practices, the Practice Section features information and tools such as forms, checklists, and other useful practice tools, as well as jobs for professionals. The Practice Section includes new information on billing and coding issues in “Coding Corner.”

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Healthy Steps Partnerships

Healthy Steps for Young Children operates successfully in private practices, community health centers, and residency training continuity clinics – and public-private partnerships. Currently, in Stillwater, Okla., the Payne County Health Department is partnering with the Warren Clinic, a private pediatrics practice. The six pediatricians from Warren Clinic work with two child development specialists, one child psychologist, and one speech pathologist who essentially play the role of Healthy Steps Specialists and who are employees of the Payne County Health Department. The key to the project’s success is frequent communication among the staff members. The Healthy Steps Specialists and physicians are pleased with Healthy Steps’ impact on their patients and their ability to provide enhanced care.

In Sarasota, Fla. (Charlotte, De Soto, Manatee, and Sarasota Counties), a publicly-supported private nonprofit organization—West Coast Access to Children’s Health (WATCH)—assigns Registered Nurses to work as care coordinators in private physicians’ offices. The five RN’s have been trained by the Boston University Healthy Steps Training Team (as was the Stillwater group) and provide Healthy Steps services.

In both communities, the Healthy Steps Specialists do developmental screenings, use Healthy Steps materials, and communicate with the other members of the medical office staff. The success of these projects is clear; both have been in operation for several years and the leaders want to expand.

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Kansas City Celebrates Early Childhood Efforts

Early childhood was the focus in Kansas City, Mo., in early April, of an event sponsored by the Francis Family Foundation and BlueCross BlueShield of Kansas City. The main speaker was Dr. Barry Zuckerman, the lead creator of Healthy Steps for Young Children and Reach Out and Read. His talk stressed the overwhelming importance of warm and frequent parent-child contact, a major goal of Healthy Steps, and noted the significant links between a child’s environment and brain development.

Four lead Healthy Steps physicians spoke about Healthy Steps: Delcis Filardi, Children’s Mercy Hospital; Rafela Herrera, Cabot Westside Health Center; Warren Johnson, III, Swope Health Center; and Kevin Maben, KU Medical Center. It was noted with appropriate pride that Dr. Filardi trained at KU Medical Center and upon becoming an attending physician at Children’s Mercy worked successfully to bring Healthy Steps to the patients and to the 60 pediatrics residents trained there.

The celebration was organized by Juliet Hawley, coordinator of Healthy Steps for BlueCross BlueShield of Kansas City.

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Seattle Healthy Steps Experiment Results Published

The Group Health Cooperative of the Puget Sound in Seattle implemented Healthy Steps in 1999 within an experimental design. The results at children’s ages of three months were reported earlier (in American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Spring 2004) and the full 30 month results have just been published by Brian Johnston, MD, and colleagues in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, August 2006. A purpose of the project was to observe how Healthy Steps operated within a staff-model HMO’s integrated delivery system. Healthy Steps families, compared with comparison families, showed positive outcomes in timely well-child care, immunization rates, breastfeeding, television viewing, injury prevention, and discipline strategies. As part of the implementation, Healthy Steps was provided to some families prenatally, resulting in larger expressive vocabularies at age 24 months. The data suggest that there was little additional benefit to offering Healthy Steps during the prenatal period.

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New Healthy Steps Sites

Healthy Steps welcomes Cabot Clinic in Kansas City, Mo., Comprensive Family Care Center of Montefiore Medical Group, Pediatrics Residency Training in Bronx, N.Y., and Denver Children’s Hospital Pediatrics Residency Training. These three are soon to be joined by St. Josephs Hospital Pediatrics Residency Training in Phoenix, Ariz., and the University of California at San Francisco-Fresno Family Medicine Residency Training. And several more new sites are in planning or discussion.

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Healthy Steps Materials Available Online

In case you have not heard, Healthy Steps materials for parents and medical providers are available online. Healthy Steps LINKletters, Parent Prompt Sheets, Parent Handouts, Quick Check Sheets, and sample pages from the Child Health and Development Record are now available for download, and many of the materials are available in both Spanish and English.

To access these materials, visit the Healthy Steps website at www.healthysteps.org and click on Healthy Steps Materials on the left-hand navigation menu. The materials can also be found on The Commonwealth Fund's website: http://www.cmwf.org/General/General_show.htm?doc_id=246567.

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Information for Families of Preemies

Preemie Magazine is a free print publication and a free online community for both parents and professionals caring for preemies (from birth to about age eight). Each Preemie print issue includes information for parents with a child in the NICU, going home, growing up and going to school. The Preemie online community is full of resources for parents and professionals to connect with others via support groups, online forums, event calendars and more.

Preemie offers free drop shipments of its quarterly publication to hospitals, early intervention programs, special education programs, support groups (preemie-focused, multiples), as well as organizations that serve this like-minded audience. For more information on signing up for a free subscription or arranging a free drop shipment, please visit www.preemiemagazine.com.

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