AMCHP 2006 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
EARLY CHILDHOOD: BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR LIFELONG HEALTH
March 4-8, 2006
RUTH PEROU: I do have handouts, but I did want to highlight the work of Paul Dworkin, working in Connecticut. He started this work I think early in the 1990s doing something called Child Serve, which is to increase developmental screening for the entire state and now they're moving into Help Me Grow again to promote overall children's development. And here it's like they've got the whole state working on some of these issues.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: I know Paul.
RUTH PEROU: So you know the work he's been doing. But I think the key, the extraordinary work that Paul has done and someone that's just come out in the Journal Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics, a roundtable they held and it's again information that anybody can take to learn from and be able to apply into your own communities. But I think the key of the work that they did is they got buy‑in from all communities and all different resources and all different providers. And I think that that's going to be critical for all the work that we do. You know the programs that are successful it's usually one champion who is going to, you know, persevere no matter what and then you get buy‑in from everybody that's impacted by what you're trying to change. That's the success that he found. And I go through these rather quickly because these are Paul's slides and he would do, believe me he would be much better pleased by his presentation than mine.
But really it was looking at a community‑based approach to enhance developmental screening and developmental surveillance, and developmental surveillance in essence is to ensure that you're not just providing developmental screening but you're really monitoring children's developmental health. And all the systems where that children and family are interacting. The two components were Child Serve where he did initially and Help Me Grow that's funded by the Children's Trust Fund. And then what he did is he wanted to generate data that would be available for program development and public policy changes throughout the nation. Again, I won't go through these, but we've heard these all before early intervention is importantly. Gaps exist and there are changes that need to be made and it has to be coordinated.
And I think maybe we have not heard this earlier but this whole concept of like why increase developmental screening or why do any kind of screening if you're not going to be able to provide the services? If you're not going to make that referral or those services are not available. And I think that that's both an ethical question and an empirical question about what's going on and what we've heard from most parents and most people it's like you need to document whether or not the services are available. You need to start to do the screening because there's that other side that early intervention specialist will tell you we're overwhelmed but that there are other resources within that community that could provide services for this family. And I think that that's what Paul found in Connecticut. This is going back to the planning partners early on he got everybody on board and including the state Legislature, but working with Brighter Futures initiative, Children's Development Program, regional healthcare providers which play a critical role in what they do. They actually have child development specialists at each of the regional centers that their sole job, one of the major jobs and duty is to keep track of all available resources and keep them electronically and up‑to‑date so that's available to all providers.
The children's health council parents were involved. Part C was involved. I think also AAP was involved the Commonwealth Fund was involved. So this is critical to all these successful programs is that you have everybody's buy in. And what they did is they trained the child health providers on, again, similar component. You have to do some training. You have to do some education and some awareness. Create the awarenesses filling the gap of the community‑based programs and then develop this whole referral and monitoring system. They had like a one number you call 1‑800. So if you have any concerns, you just pick up the phone and call. That's what they were hearing a lot from pediatricians is like I don't want to thumb through this or thumb through that, give me one number if I have a concern can I call someone and ask. And that was a huge success. Now Connecticut is small. So but some of these, we can garnish or learn from some of these programs is can these be implemented at the county level, at the regional level, in smaller communities, are some of these things things we can learn that can be implemented, maybe not statewide but if you do that and network all those different regions, you can come up with a program that's very similar.
And the other thing here is data collection and analysis. Again, providing that data and that information that's lacking. And then translating it into the lay public. Translating it to legislators to say ‑‑.