Social pediatrics

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Social pediatrics is a whole-family and whole-community approach to child medical problems and prevention. It was pioneered in Montreal by a group of doctors who took the African proverb as their guide:

It takes a village to raise a child.

To focus on an entire neighbourhood village at once, new community centre facilities were required that allowed for communal meals, play, unstructured time, and other elements of intentional community. Doctors and nurses are introduced to children first as playmates not as supervisors, increasing their trust and likelihood that key information about the sources of their medical issues will be revealed and accurately integrated in their case.

In the medical model of pediatrics, physicians are typically divorced from community groups and anti-poverty efforts. In a typical case, a child with asthma moving between foster homes was being treated in a series of hospitals that never detected her cystic fibrosis - resulting in mistaken assumptions about her care that had led to her being removed from her original foster home. An extremely damaging and stressful shift that affected her well-being was avoided by integrating information about her case from the various sources in contact with the child.

The social pediatric model is thus claimed to save very much on hospital care costs, and to increase social capital in the community as a whole, which is claimed in most analyses, e.g. those of the London Health Observatory, to be a main predictor of well-being.