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Why I Appreciate My Children's Medical Home

by Kate Orville, Parent and Co-Director, Medical Home Leadership Network

Sometimes I feel like my children’s pediatric practice is our medical home just because we’re there so often.  

Over the past few years my husband and I have visited our children’s doctors for a variety of reasons including multiple life threatening food allergies, asthma, seizures, speech and language delays, motor delays, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and eczema. Plus the expected well child visits and occasional broken bone, nursemaid’s elbow or eye infection.  We’ve become parent experts on childhood chronic conditions, at least in our own kids.  

We have one primary care physician and a couple of others we see when we need to get in quickly and our main pediatrician is unavailable.  Here’s what I value about the doctors we trust to help us manage our children’s health and development:

• They treat us with respect and acknowledge that we know our children better than anyone else.
• They listen to us when we describe what we thinking is happening with our child, gently and with humor talk directly to our child as they examine him or her, explain what they think the problem is, and offer options for how to proceed.
• They encourage us to ask questions and they will admit when they just don’t know the answer- but that they will try to find out more information and get back to us.
• We come up with a plan of action together. They either provide a written plan (e.g. for asthma care) or we ask them to write down what we have just decided together (especially if there’s one parent and two wiggly kids).
• They (as well as we) serve as the central "bank" for all our different medical reports from other specialists, such as the neurologist, allergist, occupational therapist etc.
• They linked us with early intervention services.
• They are open to feedback from us and other families and are interested in continually improving their services.

And here’s some of what I value about the rest of the clinic staff and the structure of the clinic:

• The office staff, nurses and medical assistants always make us feel welcome.
• The clinic asks families to fill out a brief form listing and prioritizing the reasons for their visit today as well as any school forms, prescription refills or other paperwork needed.  This form helps me organize my own thoughts and document the items I want to cover so I know they’ll be discussed.
• Clinic staff smile when I hand them the multiple food allergy and asthma medication forms we need for school and child care and complete them in a day or two.
• The practice has a nurse line we can call with questions from home – if it is after office hours and we needed to call the nurse line at the local hospital or visit the emergency room, we get a follow-up phone call from the practice the next day asking how our child is.

As my children have grown older, I’ve learned how to deal with most of the ups and downs of having children with special health care needs.  It has helped a lot to have a supportive circle of family and friends, join a parent support group, get to know other families who have children with challenges, and learn how to get good health information from the internet and the library. That and LOTS of practice.

But without the partnership and support of our children’s health care providers, I think it would be a lot harder to try to be the mom I want to be or for my children to blossom into who they are becoming.