BOCYF Projects

Paying Attention to Children in a Changing Health Care System

Publications: Paying Attention to Children in a Changing Health Care System: Summaries of Workshops (1994)

America's health care system is being reshaped by a variety of market-driven changes at the same time that states are emerging as the major governmental influence on health care policy. Market forces have led to increasing pressures for cost containment, changes in the organization and financing of Medicaid and other publicly funded health care, consolidation of health care delivery plans and insurers, and new divisions of responsibility among health care professionals and organizations. Amid these changes, the health and well-being of children can slip from view. Although most children are fundamentally healthy, they require health care that emphasizes such preventative services as immunizations and regular monitoring of physical and psychosocial growth and development.

In 1996, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families and the Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention of the Institute of Medicine reprinted summaries from five workshops held between 1991 and 1994 on maternal and child health in a changing health care system, in a volume entitled Paying Attention to Children in a Changing Health Care System: Summaries of Workshops.

Two of the reports reproduced in this volume are from a two-day workshop held in July 1994 on Maternal and Child Health Under Health Care Reform. The volume also contains a chapter entitled, "Including Children and Pregnant Women in Health Care Reform," from a 1992 report prepared under the aegis of the National Forum on the Future of Children and Families. The last chapter, "Strategies for Assuring the Provision of Quality Services Through Managed Care Delivery Systems to Children with Special Health Care Needs," summarizes a workshop organized in December 1994 by the Board on Health Care Services of the Institute of Medicine.