Human Services News

From The Commonwealth Fund:

Healthy Steps for Young Children---a program designed to foster closer relationships between health care professionals and parents in addressing the physical, emotional, and intellectual development of young children---significantly improves continuity of care practices among pediatricians in training, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The study, "Healthy Steps for Young Children Program in Pediatric Residency Training: Impact on Primary Care Outcomes" (Pediatrics, Sept. 2007), also found that the program increases pediatric residents' documentation of important psychosocial issues in children "Multiple indices suggest important benefits of incorporating a Healthy Steps curriculum into pediatric residency training," concluded the research team, which was led by Leo G. Niederman, M.D., M.P.H.

Healthy Steps, a national initiative launched with support from The Commonwealth Fund and others, seeks to improve the quality of preventive health care for infants and toddlers.

A key program element is the introduction of the Healthy Steps Specialist---a co-practitioner with training in early childhood development---into the pediatric practice setting to focus on behavioral, developmental, and psychosocial issues.

Incorporating Healthy Steps into practices has been shown in several previous studies to have positive effects for children and families.

This is the first study to report on primary care outcomes following the introduction of Healthy Steps into pediatric residency training.

The researchers tracked three groups of children, from birth to 36 months of age.

While the difference in developmental, behavioral, and psychosocial diagnoses was not statistically significant, there were significantly fewer diagnoses in these domains at the non-Healthy Steps site, where no residents were exposed to the program.

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