Social pediatrics
1465932
156343634
2007-09-07T20:29:25Z
216.255.101.59
{{unreferenced|date=November 2006}}
'''Social pediatrics''' is a whole-family and whole-community approach to child medical problems and prevention. It was pioneered in [[Montreal]] by a group of doctors who took the [[Africa]]n proverb as their guide:
:''It takes a village to raise a child.''
A main center of training for social pediatrics exists in the Department of Family and Social Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. [http://www.socialmedicine.org Montefiore Department of Family and Social Medicine]
To focus on an entire [[neighbourhood village]] at once, new [[community centre]] facilities were required that allowed for communal meals, play, unstructured time, and other elements of [[intentional community]]. Doctors and nurses are introduced to children first as playmates not as supervisors, increasing their trust and likelihood that key information about the sources of their medical issues will be revealed and accurately integrated in their case.
In the medical model of [[pediatrics]], physicians are typically divorced from community groups and [[anti-poverty]] efforts. In a typical case, a child with [[asthma]] moving between [[foster home]]s was being treated in a series of hospitals that never detected her [[cystic fibrosis]] - resulting in mistaken assumptions about her care that had led to her being removed from her original foster home. An extremely damaging and stressful shift that affected her [[well-being]] was avoided by integrating information about her case from the various sources in contact with the child.
The social pediatric model is thus claimed to save very much on [[hospital care cost]]s, and to increase [[social capital]] in the community as a whole, which is claimed in most analyses, e.g. those of the [[London Health Observatory]], to be a main predictor of [[well-being]].
[[Category:pediatrics]]
[[de:Sozialpädiatrie]]
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