Health Equity
Healthcare Providers
In today’s busy office, it can be difficult to find the time to locate appropriate resources for issues related to behavior, development or learning. Parents turn to you for direction and advice for issues ranging from parenting support and education to discipline and behavior management. Families often expect you to have the answers at your fingertips. Additionally, helping families find the most appropriate resource may be further complicated by individual agency and program criteria regarding city of residence, income level, or language among other factors.
Help Me Grow, a free service for you and your families, is supported by First 5 Fox Valley and can make the referral process easier for you, your staff and the families in your practice.
Help Me Grow staff can assist you by locating the appropriate, non-medical services that meet the individualized needs of your patients from Birth through age 5 and their families. When a family is referred to Help Me Grow, they speak directly with a Child Development Specialist who has access to the most current resources. When Help Me Grow refers families to services, a letter detailing the referrals is provided to the family and sent to your office for the child’s medical records. Keeping you informed of the referrals made to your patients is a priority for us.
Examples of common referrals:
- Developmental screening using a norm referenced tool
- Mental Health or Social /Emotional screening
- School district and Head Start programs
- Family Resource Centers
- In-home parent training
- Parenting classes & parent support groups
- Early Intervention
- Early literacy programs
- Childhood nutrition resources
- Family Basic Needs support
Equity cannot be taken for Granted
While trying to understand what helps a child thrive and not just survive- the unraveling of normative conditions changed during the challenge of a global pandemic. Safer-at-home policies delayed well child visits, dental care, scheduled vaccinations; and home visiting interventions, Head Start and 4K classes were suddenly virtual, but only if you had broadband access. Basic needs like food security, financial stability, access to health services including mental health options were new struggles for some families and exacerbated reality for others. Civil unrest has cast a wide-open view on systemic and structural racism that hid in plain sight affecting so many things – among them children’s access to early childhood services.