When launching a public health program, one of the first things to do is conduct a needs assessment. A needs assessment helps you determine what needs to be accomplished to reach your project goals. This assessment of needs then informs a project’s overall plan and approaches by helping you identify targeted strategies and prioritize resources….
The 2020 census is in full swing and its results will have a major impact on children’s health efforts in the years to come. The census findings inform the appropriation of billions of dollars in federal funding across states and communities, which directly affects public health, housing, and early education programs. The census also determines…
Right from the beginning, fathers play a big role in their children’s health and development. Studies show that father involvement during the perinatal period and the first year of life leads to children who are more ready for school, have an advanced vocabulary and enhanced social skills, and are better able to regulate their emotions….
Quality improvement (QI) projects are centered on collaborative learning. Teams accelerate change by engaging in rapid-cycle testing, sharing what works, and then spreading and scaling those successes and lessons-learned across the collaborative. Facilitating collaboration can be challenging though. Teams are often based in different locations and balancing competing priorities, and funding constraints can make it…
In the U.S., a rare disease is defined as a condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people. Millions of Americans, many of them children, are living with a rare disease. To help show the impact and prevalence of rare diseases, we invited our network to share their stories. Read their submissions below and share your own…
When Precious Lee was a year old, she began to experience severe pain in one of her arms. Her mother, Tammy, knew something was wrong—Precious had stopped eating and wasn’t moving her arm at all—but the doctors at their local hospital didn’t share her concern. “My mom brought me to the hospital multiple times, but…
Children’s earliest experiences directly affect the architecture of their developing brains, which then provides either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all the development and behavior that follows. Because of this, adverse experiences during childhood can negatively impact developing brain architecture and have lifelong impacts. In fact, according to a recent federal report, at…
In the past decade, overall infant mortality rates have gone down. Yet, nationwide sleep-related infant death rates have stagnated, and the rate of accidental suffocation or strangulation in bed has actually increased. Changing these statistics requires more than teaching families about safe sleep guidelines; it requires concerted efforts to empower families as champions for their…
New NICHQ Board of Directors member, Cara Coleman, JD, MPH, has a personal stake in health care improvement: Coleman spent her childhood overseas where she saw how lived experiences affected the health and well-being of countless individuals. As an adult, Coleman confronted the systems that exist in our country’s backyard: first in public health; then…
Young children in foster care often experience developmental health concerns and delays, which builds a foundation for continued adverse outcomes later in life. When families reunite after foster care, parents have a vital opportunity to promote their children’s developmental health and ultimately improve their life-long health outcomes. “Parents are their children’s earliest teachers and biggest…