Parent Partnership:
The cornerstone of the medical home

A medical home revolves around a family-professional partnership that is the foundation for wellness, acute and chronic condition management. Medical home is not a program adopted by a practice for children with special health care needs. Although some of the aspects of a medical home are specifically for children with special health care needs, a medical home actually represents quality health care that focuses on family-physician partnerships for all children. "All children deserve a medical home" is one of the Healthy People 2010 national health objectives.

Regardless whether a family brings their child to see a physician for acute health care, preventive care or for management of a chronic health condition, they want to have a trusting collaborative relationship with their child’s doctor. This family-professional partnership should prevail in whatever type of care they are seeking. This partnership is the foundation of the medical home model. Without this trusting collaborative partnership, the family does NOT have a medical home. Beyond this partnership, the medical home model provides a blue print for practices to incorporate best practice models and evidence-based medicine as much as possible. This means knowing community resources, communicating effectively with sub-specialists, implementing professional policy guidelines like developmental screening, immunization schedules and Bright Futures Guidelines in well child care.

Families can be valuable assets when you decide to develop a formal approach to improving quality in your practice. Seeking input from families who have a child with special health care needs provides valuable first-hand experiences that primary care physicians would otherwise not realize. Practice staff can learn a lot from families when they engage them in discussing the day-to-day issues, barriers and challenges they face in caring for and meeting the many needs of their child and family.

Physicians need to reach out and actively encourage parents to become “parent partners” with the practice. This can be done as part of an organized Quality Improvement Team (QIT) or through family surveys, focus groups or simply through everyday communication with families. Impromptu communication is a good tool, but planned communication efforts are more consistent and meaningful over time.

Practices often recognize the value but fail to elicit family input. Families understand the “little things” that make a visit to the physician effective and beneficial. This can include such things as how the practice has trained staff to answer an initial phone call and how the practice can schedule additional time to treat children with special health care needs. By asking families “what could be done better”, or “what can we do to make your appointment more beneficial”, these simple questions can provide opportunities for families to help improve the quality of health care delivery within the practice.