Help Me Grow Program Promotes Children's Healthy Development
Commonwealth Fund
Developed by pediatrician Paul Dworkin, M.D., physician-in-chief for Connecticut Children's Medical Center, Help Me Grow trains and supports pediatric practitioners in screening and assessing potentially at-risk children and in eliciting parents' opinions and concerns.
Last June, child health providers and policymakers from across the nation gathered at the Help Me Grow Roundtable to learn about the program's successes and explore the potential for its replication.
Simplifying Connections to Resources In "Enhancing Developmental Services in Primary Care: The Help Me Grow Experience," Joanna Bogin, M.S., Help Me Grow supervisor, discusses the potential of Connecticut's program to serve as a model for other states.
Help Me Grow succeeds by offering a single point of entry to the system---through a toll-free phone line---as well as by having dedicated staff to make connections between families and community-based resources.
The author offers several examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach: the mother of an autistic child is connected with family support groups; a grandmother with a hard-to-control grandchild is linked with a grandparent support group; a care coordinator helps a mother find a domestic violence support group, after a child health provider expresses concerns; and a local churchgoer provides translation services for a family that speaks an uncommon language and has difficulty understanding their pediatric provider.
Help Me Grow trainers make short presentations in providers' offices, offering lunch, continuing education credits, and free resource kits.
Getting and Using Feedback To be as effective as possible, the Help Me Grow trainers solicited input from providers, a process described by the authors of "Barriers to Enhancing Practice-Based Developmental Services."
