{"id":127,"date":"2015-01-18T02:20:45","date_gmt":"2015-01-18T02:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/?p=127"},"modified":"2015-03-08T18:50:30","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T18:50:30","slug":"getting-to-the-moon-was-easy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/?p=127","title":{"rendered":"Getting to the Moon was Easy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Health Affairs (December 2014) were multiple articles on children\u2019s health, including <em>The Changing Nature of Children\u2019s Health Development: New Challenges Require New Policy Solutions<\/em>. \u00a0The authors, Neal Halfon et al., suggest that the current health care system is poorly designed to ensure optimal lasting health of children into their adult years.\u00a0\u00a0 Using the science of life-course health development to support their view, they assert that factors present in early during childhood impact health throughout life more so than we appreciate, and that our current approach to health in the U.S. doesn\u2019t address these early influences.<\/p>\n<p>This new science provides an explanatory framework for understanding how poor health and social adversity during childhood can affect lifelong health. Early interventions, especially in early childhood, have been shown to lessen the impact of these social and environmental influences. The authors contend: \u201cStudying life-course health development has left little doubt that a nurturing and materially sufficient early life is an essential component of a healthy society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The authors call for a national action plan, with involvement of public, private, philanthropic, and faith-based sectors, where local and regional partnerships would link child health care providers, city and county governments, payers, employers, and schools. They suggest that most health creating interventions need to have its roots at the local and regional level. They propose the child health care community drive the creation of community accountable health development systems designed as integrated networks of medical homes, early childhood programs, school health centers, children\u2019s hospitals, and other community health services.<\/p>\n<p>What the article doesn\u2019t do is reveal the secret to achieving this vision. Those communities that have made some progress all have one thing in common: funding.\u00a0\u00a0 And the funding typically comes from a mix of local, regional and national sources, many of whom consider themselves partners in fulfilling the vision, which generally leads to the funding being somewhat sustainable over a long period of time, enough to discover how to make a difference, and demonstrating some results.\u00a0 \u00a0In addition to funding, perseverance may be a critical ingredient to the formula.<\/p>\n<p><em>If We Can Put a Man on the Moon<\/em> is a book by William Eggers. \u00a0Mr. Eggers provides some thoughts on why we are failing to solve our biggest social problems.\u00a0\u00a0 Lots of great insights except for perhaps one when it comes to children: the social transformation that needs to take place to improve the health and wellbeing of our children will take a lot more people believing in it and participating in it than what it took to put someone on the moon. \u00a0It will require the public thinking more long-term than ever before and more about the children than themselves. \u00a0 The Moon was easy.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Health Affairs (December 2014) were multiple articles on children\u2019s health, including The Changing Nature of Children\u2019s Health Development: New Challenges Require New Policy Solutions. \u00a0The authors, Neal Halfon et al., suggest that the current health care system is poorly designed to ensure optimal lasting health of children into their adult years.\u00a0\u00a0 Using the science [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leadingachildrenshospital.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}