Their goal is “to say to the Mayor and the Health Commissioner that we want you to listen, and hear, and adopt some of the policy measures because we think that coming from the community, we know what's going on with children and teens,” said Anthony Feliciano, coordinator of the Commission on the Public's Health System.
CPHS worked since 1991 to include public opinion in the formation of health system policies. Their mission emphasizes equal healthcare access and anti-privatization. The CPHS has teamed up with the Child Heath Initiative to take the public's temperature and turn their opinions and concerns into plans for healthcare reform.
The commission led a community-driven initiative that looked at the healthcare situation in each borough, starting with surveys of parents. “What they did in each borough was to create a policy agenda around access to healthcare for children and teens,” Feliciano said.
“This City does not have comprehensive healthcare system for children and teens,” Feliciano said.
“There's a lot of reports out there about adults, but not a lot about children and teens.”
From their research, they compiled two reports, “Yes, New York Can,” and “Voices from the Community.” The first is the borough agendas that researchers designed, and the second is the parent survey results. Both reports are downloadable online at the CPHS website, www.cphsnyc.org.
The survey was conducted at community meetings and administered in twelve languages: English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Korean, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Urdu. 659 parents and 114 young people, mainly people of color, constituted the convenience sampling.
What the researchers found was that though the overwhelming majority of children sampled were insured, have a primary physician, and get regular checkups. Emergency room visits were common with a percentage of the children.
“Children in 243 families (37.2 percent) used an Emergency Room in the last twelve months. The percent of Emergency Room visits was very high in the Bronx (49.6 percent) and in Staten Island (50 percent),” read the survey results.
What this told the researchers was that preventable health issues were not caught early on and that certain boroughs experienced poorer healthcare.
Some of the other issues parents brought up are common to many public healthcare facilities: long wait times, little time spent with the physician, language barriers, cultural disconnect, and long travel time. When asked what health problems concern them the most, parents in all boroughs listed asthma, obesity, and diabetes.
Different boroughs emphasized different concerns: mental health was listed as a problem in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island participants mentioned access as an issue, and nutrition is a concern in Manhattan.
Among the young people who participated in the 12 focus groups, many expressed the need for clinics in their schools, greater focus on STD and pregnancy prevention, and respect from their physicians, especially toward immigrant youth, whom they say don't necessarily get treated with “dignity and attention.”
One young person from Brooklyn insightfully said, “Doctors are not like the olden days. Man, you got these interns coming in from college and stuff like that. Before, back in the day, the doctors would take the time … and handle you as a patient, talk confidentially with you. Now you go there and you could hear the doctor in the next room telling the patient what's wrong with him.”