Pediatricians are specially educated and trained in diagnosing and treating illnesses in infants, children and adolescents.
Comprehensive well-child care (or preventive care) benefits not only the individual patient and family, but the healthcare system as a whole.
Well-child care truly is one of the greatest values in medicine. A whole year of preventive or well-child care costs relatively little, and provides huge value in both quality of care and in the costly illnesses and injuries that are prevented.
Children deserve a medical home - a place where their care is accessible, family-centered, continuous, comprehensive, coordinated, compassionate, and culturally effective.
Pediatricians are not just about shots and growth charts. We are concerned with your child’s entire spectrum of development - physical, mental, social, and emotional.
Many pediatricians provide certain types of care at no profit, and often at a loss. For example, the vaccines we administer may cost our practice more than it will be reimbursed. But we do it because we believe so strongly in the importance of immunizations to the individual child and to our nation’s public health.
Pediatricians need and deserve to be fairly compensated for their work, and they need to run their practices as businesses despite a high proportion of low-cost or free care to their patients.
Parents are opting to use urgent care, retail-based clinics and other venues to obtain quick diagnoses, treatments or physicals without having to make an appointment to see their pediatrician. This means their child is seen by someone who does not have the child’s medical history.
Pediatricians have a great deal of education and training about infectious diseases in children. Isn’t it best to have the experts diagnose and treat such an illness so that the child - and the community - have the best chance of fighting it?
The idea that children can have minor problems taken care of at these alternative venues, and that the pediatrician’s office should be saved for chronic or complex problems, is not good in a couple of ways. For one thing, it fragments the patient’s care, and for another, it creates a business model that can’t work for many primary-care pediatricians.
Many pediatric practices have expanded their office hours to better meet the needs of patients and parents. We are looking at doing so in the future.
Adapted from the American Academy of Pediatrics Website:
