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Children’s Preventive Health Care Collaborative
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The Children’s Preventive Health Care Collaborative is an initiative to disseminate successful approaches—reinforced during the implementation of the Kids Get Care program—for improving the delivery of preventive services to low-income children. A comprehensive set of preventive services, including medical, dental, developmental and mental health services, is vital for children.
This collaborative will focus on integrating oral health and developmental screening and referrals into children’s primary care services. If you are interested in participating, please see the application for the 2005-06 program year. Both the Collaborative and Kids Get Care are programs of the King County Health Action Plan, a nine-year-old coalition of health care and community organizations convened by Public Health - Seattle & King County.
The Children’s Preventive Health Care Collaborative is structured as a focused health care improvement collaborative. Up to 10 pediatric and family practices that provide services predominantly to Medicaid children and up to 10 community health centers throughout Washington State can participate in the project from December 2005 to June 2006. It will be staffed by the National Initiative for Children’s Health Care Quality and University of Washington Child Health Institute personnel. More information about these organizations is available at www.nichq.org and www.childhealthinstitute.org.
Participating teams will learn best practices in incorporating oral health and developmental screening into well child visits and how to increase overall well child visit rates. They will attend one-day meetings in the Seattle area in January, March and June 2006.
- Oral health promotion: Fluoride varnish has been demonstrated to reduce caries by 38%. Medicaid will pay medical providers $13.39 to varnish children’s teeth, up to three times per year. In most medical practices using this treatment, nurses or medical assistants apply fluoride varnish right before immunizations are provided.
- Developmental services: The Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) is a parent administered developmental survey. It takes parents about 10 minutes to fill out and typically takes providers two to three minutes to go over during a well child visit. It can detect 70 to 80 percent of children with developmental problems. Typically only 30 percent of children with developmental issues are identified before they reach kindergarten.
To get more information about the Children’s Preventive Health Care Collaborative, please contact Nicole Reavis, UW Child Health Institute, 206-616-3307, nreavis@u.washington.edu or Kirsten Wysen, Public Health-Seattle & King County, kirsten.wysen@kingcounty.gov or 206-205-0661.
Additional informational flyers:
The Children's Preventive Health Care Collaborative is funded by the Washington State legislature with additional support from local funders. The collaborative will be staffed by Public Health - Seattle & King County and the Child Health Institute. The Child Health Institute is an inter-disciplinary research group comprised of faculty and staff from the Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, and Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Washington. More information is available at www.childhealthinstitute.org
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