Community Achievements: Humble Pie | Cincinnati Children's

https://www.cincinnatichildrens.org Camille Graham, MD , Community Pediatrician: "You know, this is a big powerhouse. Right? Look at how Children’s has grown. I would say the next frontier is gonna be the community and addressing social determinants of health." ‘Health’ and ‘care’ go hand in hand and good healthcare is built on a foundation of continuity, trust and relationships. Dr. Graham: "For what we do as community pediatricians, it is about relationships. It’s about relationships with the families and obviously the children of the family, but it’s also about our relationship with our community. You know once you get out into the community, you see where the need is." Beginning with the Babies’ Milk Fund Clinic in the early 1900s, faculty from Cincinnati Children’s provided clinical care for those who didn’t have access. Dr. Graham: "And then eventually nurses went out into schools and mass vaccinations happened. But there were clinics before there were federally qualified health centers that provided a lot of those services and they were staffed by a lot of the faculty here." Prior to the Affordable Care Act, Child Health Insurance Programs helped to fill the gap in healthcare for children. But it’s not enough. Dr. Graham: "Again though, the problem is access because not every provider in the community takes Medicaid. As an African American physician knowing that in the city of Cincinnati at least half the kids had Medicaid, if not more, that I would really not be doing what I wanted to do as a person, if I turned my back on that population." "I do remember this conversation with my grandfather and I told him that when I grew up I wanted to take care of poor people and he said “well fool, you gotta eat”. I’ll never forget that. My grandfather practiced out of his home and the pharmacist was down the street. He did house calls. So he really knew the neighborhood. It’s interesting because we’re going back to that. We’re going back to community based care where we use community health workers, social workers, home nurses to, you know, fill in those kind of gaps." "Obviously, we can’t do that by ourselves. I don’t Cincinnati Children’s can do it by itself. But I think we need to have some really strong partnerships to really change the course for a lot of the kids in the community. We’re seeing a lot of kind of similar problems, right? Obesity, we’re seeing problems with depression, anxiety, suicide. So those are issues that kind of cut across boundaries. But the other issue we’re seeing is on the neighborhood level. We’ve mapped the genetic code but we haven’t figured why someone’s zip code makes such a difference in their healthcare. So we gotta tackle these big problems and we gotta do it in partnership with not only the community physicians. More importantly, we gotta do it partnership the community. And that means eating a little bit of humble pie. You know, find out what’s important to the community and work with the community to change things. I know we can do it because we’ve done QI for everything else, right? We solved some really big hairy problems. So we can solve it."