Center for Collaborative Primary Care Summary
The Center for Collaborative Primary Care (CPC), a trauma-informed, multidisciplinary medical home, was formed in October of 2017, in response to increased need at St. Christopher’s Pediatric Associates for intensive care for children with high-risk social needs. The goal of the program is to provide intensive primary care support to children who have been placed out of the home by the child welfare system (DHS) or that are at risk of becoming involved with DHS. We care for patients with social factors that include parental substance abuse, parental mental health concerns, intimate partner violence, and past physical abuse or neglect of a child. To date, we have enrolled almost 800 patients that range in age from newborn to 20 years old. CPC provides primary and acute medical care with a consistent physician or nurse practitioner, in addition to a dedicated nurse care coordinator and social worker.
Some of the patients in CPC have been removed from the home of their parents due to safety concerns and are placed in foster care or kinship care. Children placed out of the home have higher instances of fragmented medical care and are more likely to “fall between the cracks” of a large medical system. The same is true of socially complex children who have not been placed out of the home. By providing a multidisciplinary medical home with intensive social work and case management services, we can defragment medical care for these vulnerable children. For those children still in the home but at risk of being placed, we also hope to decrease the likelihood of these children being abused or neglected and help keep family units together.