Children with Special Health Care Needs
In 2011, the Foundation entered its second year of investing in work to improve the health care system for children, particularly those with special health care needs. The goal is to develop a higher quality continuum of care for children with chronic conditions, many of whom are treated in children’s hospitals, including Packard Children’s. While treatment in children’s hospitals generally is excellent, the systems that support children and families on an ongoing basis in their communities are less robust.
To begin to address this gap, in late 2010 the Foundation launched the California Collaborative for Children with Special Health Care Needs, which grew to more than 300 members in 2011. This statewide organization brings together families, providers, payers, policymakers and others to advocate for better programs and policies. Throughout the year, the Foundation sponsored a series of meetings around the state to identify key issues that the Collaborative will address.
In 2011, the Foundation also moved forward on its grantmaking strategies, under the direction of Edward L. Schor, MD, a nationally known authority on children’s health and health care who joined the Foundation in September. Among other projects, Foundation grants will support a group of young investigators who are conducting research on children with special health care needs, and a project at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center that is looking at designing new models of care for these children. The Foundation also continued to fund efforts by parents groups to improve the system of care, providing strategic planning grants for Family Voices, the national parent-run advocacy organization, and its California counterpart. The Foundation also underwrote a project to develop an evaluation framework for pilot programs that are being designed to test ways of restructuring California Children’s Services, which is the state’s largest public funder of services for children with special health care needs.