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| TITLE SLIDE: Family Issues of Military Connected Children with Special Needs Extended Interview with Beth Ellen Davis, Chair, Uniform Section, American Academy of Pediatrics April 14-15 | Natcher Conference Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland |
Dr. Beth Ellen Davis: My name is Beth Ellen Davis. |
| Camera view of Dr. Beth Ellen Davis. | Dr. Davis: I’m a developmental behavior pediatrician at the University of Washington, where I currently am the Director of the University of Washington Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities program. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: Well, currently, the program that I run is to teach graduate students of all different disciplines how to care for children with special health care needs, specifically neurodevelopmental disabilities. So I will work with pediatricians, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, nutritionists, social workers, while they’re in their training to learn how to work with children, say, with autism, or with developmental delays. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: Military connected children with special health care needs has been my entire career. So I’ve worked with children with special health care needs since I was a resident in pediatrics and then did a fellowship for 3 more years to understand children with developmental disabilities. And then have been active duty my entire career in the Army. And so I care for children and their families and help them with their daily lives in every aspect of my job. And so, that piece has been very important to try to understand, where are the gaps, and how can we support these families better, and what are some things that could make a real difference for them? And not leave it up to the whims of wherever they move or whatever assignment they’re at. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: I think one of the first things that we could do that would go a long way is to just find out, when families are answering surveys or are part of studies, whether they have a military connection. Currently, we don’t ask families on even the national surveys whether they’re part of a military family. And I think that could be done fairly easily and would help us start to generate a body of information that we could study further and develop better research questions in the future. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: I have so many special families that have taught me more than I’ve taught or helped them, I think. Definitely a family that comes to mind is one that I’ve—a young girl who I’ve taken care of for the last 14 years. She has autism spectrum disorder and profound disabilities, and the way that her parents advocate for her and care for her and have learned how to find a village to surround around her has taught me so much that it’s not about her medical care, that that’s just one piece of her health and well-being, and that, really, her whole life is made up of all these other very rich pieces that are as important, or more important than me. And I think, more than anybody, she’s taught me how much it takes a village for individuals with profound need to have meaningful and happy lives. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: It kind of depends on, you know, what they’re looking for. Definitely, if it’s a military family and they’re not sure—if they’re new to the military and they’re not sure where they should go or who they should talk to—they should go to the website Military OneSource. It has so much information. There’s a special needs tool kit there that you can download and kind of walk through and learn the language of military connected children with special health care needs. And then there’s some other resources that are much more valuable for specific conditions. And of course I’m interested in health care, but I think that parents who are knowledgeable about their child’s condition can ask better questions and advocate for their child when they visit their primary care provider who has very time-limited visits, can ask the types of questions that the physician will be able to respond to without having to kind of dig through what is it that the family is asking. So being more knowledgeable, I think, helps everybody obtain better care for the child. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: So, parents of military connected children with special health care needs need to know that there are people and programs and supports available to help. It’s not going to be one phone call. It’s not going to be sometimes the easiest thing to obtain, but I would say that parents need to think about what they need for their child or what they would like for their child and then start asking for it. Because I feel that there are services that perhaps we underutilize for military connected children with special health care needs, such as certain child care. Parents think, “No one can take care of my child.” Well, ask. Or parents say, “What about a summer camp program?” Ask. You know, many areas have unbelievable summer experiences for children with all different kinds of special needs. And so I think a lot of families are kind of overwhelmed when they get to a new duty station, or overwhelmed because they’re on the base and they don’t know the community outside the base. And I would say, ask the family resources center, the family support programs, the child care centers; I think there’s a lot of resources for families with children with special health care needs. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: Child-serving providers need to take a little extra time with families of children with special health care needs. It cannot be the 5-minute or the 10-minute visit. It’s easy for me to say that, because I get a little more time as a specialist, but even when I’m doing general pediatrics, I schedule the patient who I know is going to have some behavioral issues or needs, needs more time—I schedule them at the end of the day or before the lunch break so that I can allow that visit to go a little longer. I think as clinicians, we go a long way with building rapport with our families, and they’re dealing with whatever problem they’re dealing with everyday all day long. And we’re only hearing about it for 10 or 15 minutes. Why not take a few extra minutes? |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: I think military connected children with special health care needs are a small piece of a very large population of individuals in the United States. And because of that, we think that military children with special health care needs often have all the same types of needs. And I would just say that they’re very diverse. And they’re as individual as anyone else, and we need to understand what makes them tick, what makes them happy, what needs they have, and what strengths they have—what things they don’t need. So I would say to the community that military connected children with special health care needs are diverse and individual and benefit from lots of different services that are available to them. |
| (Edit/camera cut) Dr. Davis on camera. | Dr. Davis: I think one thing that I didn’t talk about in my talk that I feel pretty strongly about is that individuals who are care providers—pediatricians, perhaps family medicine providers who have trained in the military or worked in the military—know about the military programs. And I think if we don’t maintain that group or that cadre of providers, we’re going to lose a wealth of resources for military connected children with special health care needs. As we create medical homes around the country, I think continuing to train and have military pediatricians and other child serving providers is an important part of the mix of the workforce. |
| TITLE SLIDE: Family Issues of Military Connected Children with Special Needs Click here now to Return to the Conference April 14-15 | Natcher Conference Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland |
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