CONNECTICUT CHILDRENS MEDICAL CENTER FOUNDATION INC

The Connecticut Children’s Dialysis Center provides outpatient dialysis services for children, making it the first and only pediatric center of its kind in the state. At any given time, as many as three to five patients at Connecticut Children’s need outpatient dialysis while awaiting transplant. Without local pediatric outpatient dialysis services, families had to travel to Boston, New York or Philadelphia. If a family cannot get their child to a distant pediatric outpatient dialysis clinic, children—some as young as 15 months of age who need dialysis to live—have no other option than to visit a local adult dialysis center, where the staff is not specially trained to care for pediatric patients and children are surrounded by adult patients. The Dialysis Center opened in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was bearing down on the U.S. The private treatment rooms dedicated to children who depend on dialysis to live truly saved lives.

Research shows the excellence of medical and surgical care provided to children only accounts for 10 percent of their overall healthy development. To tackle the other 90 percent, Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health (the Office) is leading the way in addressing the social, environmental, and behavioral factors that keep children from reaching their full potential.

Connecticut Children’s Medical Center formed the Office in 2012 to build stronger child-serving systems across all sectors serving children and families. The Office ensures collaboration between our hospital’s 15 community-oriented programs. It also enhances collaboration between those programs and our growing network of community-based partners, which now stands at more than 150 organizations. As a result of its pioneering work, Office programs and innovations are making a difference for children and families in Connecticut and about 30 states around the country.

Programs promote health, early detection of concerns, and intervention for all children, not only for those with complex medical conditions but also for those who are at risk for poor outcomes. We also strengthen families by helping them access support systems and teaching them to advocate for their children.

• Building Stronger Child-Serving Systems: The Office connects a diverse array of existing community-based programs to each other, and to our community-oriented hospital programs, to streamline services for families, reduce duplication in service provision, and ensure programs operate efficiently and effectively.
• Enhancing Innovation: The Office recruits and assists innovators with promising approaches designed to close existing gaps in care and improve health outcomes for children.
• Strengthening Clinical Care Delivery: Office programs have a measurable impact inside our hospital walls through innovations that strengthen clinical care delivery and connect medical center services to community services. Our programs also enhance the quality of care provided by community physicians.

The Office oversees 15 community-oriented programs that address critical issues in children’s lives that have the potential to adversely affect their health and development, including:
• Our Help Me Grow National Center supports early childhood system building efforts in 28 affiliate states by supporting affiliates in developing systems to advance developmental promotion; the earliest possible detection of delays and disorders; and to ensure children and families are referred and linked to community-based resources. Across the country, the Help Me Grow National Network served 81,140 children in 2017.
• Connecticut Children’s Co-Management Program expands the capacity of primary care providers to address common problems such as headaches, obesity and anxiety/ depression. Primary care physicians utilize referral guidelines developed through the program, which reduces costs by maintaining care for some conditions in the primary care setting while freeing up subspecialists to treat problems that truly warrant their level of care.
• Connecticut Children’s Healthy Homes Program makes children’s homes healthier, safer and more energy efficient. The program provides qualified homeowners and tenants with inspections and plans for the removal of lead and safety hazards; financial assistance for remediation; relocation assistance during construction; referrals to low-cost or no-cost weatherization programs to increase energy efficiency; and education about maintaining healthy and safe homes.
• Connecticut Children’s Injury Prevention Center (IPC) engages in research, community outreach, education, training, and public policy advocacy to reduce preventable injuries and violence to children. Its three primary focus areas are teen driving safety, teen suicide prevention, and domestic violence prevention.
• Hartford Youth HIV Identification and Linkage (HYHIL) Consortium works to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases among youth. The program provides interactive prevention education, community engagement and outreach, and youth friendly HIV/STD screenings.

For more information about Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health, visit https://www.connecticutchildrens.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/OCCH-Flyer-2018-18-346.pdf.