Helping families find their way to health
Doctors are making a new kind of referral at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland – to FIND, the Family Information and Navigation Desk. The program helps families address non-medical issues like homelessness and food insecurity, which often have more impact on a child’s health than medical care does.
FIND was the brainchild of pediatrician Dayna Long, MD. She describes a patient typical of those who spurred its creation: a 4-year-old girl who’d been to the emergency room several times for asthma. “The child was still wheezing and coughing,” says Long. “Traditional medicine would teach that ‘uncontrolled asthma [means] they’re non-compliant with their medicines.’”
But Long’s deep interest in health equity leads her to dig deeper with such patients. In this case, the girl’s family lived in a shelter, where they were exposed to secondhand smoke and often went hungry. And the girl’s primary caregiver, though a “fantastic, loving” grandmother, had some mental health challenges.
So, Long referred the family to one of FIND’s 30 volunteer resource specialists, who are trained by social workers to navigate the maze of government agencies and nonprofits that can help in such situations. In this case, the grandmother was referred for counseling, and the family was enrolled in a food-stamp program, directed to a food bank, given housing advice, and registered in a local nature program.
Long, a specialist in asthma care and a UCSF resident alumna, learned early on that childhood asthma is especially susceptible to social determinants of health. “Simply refilling this girl’s asthma medicines,” she explains, “wasn’t addressing the stress, the environmental triggers, that were leading to her emergency-room visits.”
“I got to a real decision point,” Long explains, of what led her to create FIND. “I either decide to leave medicine, or I do something from inside to fix the system.” Established in 2012, FIND now runs on a robust technology platform that helps volunteers link families to the most appropriate resources and helps the program’s leaders assess its effectiveness on a population-wide level or stratified on the basis of language, age, or other demographic factors.
“When I started this work,” reflects Long, “well-meaning individuals told me, ‘Dayna, you’re not going to solve poverty.’ My answer is always, ‘Well, we certainly have to try.’”
https://campaign.ucsf.edu/stories/helping-families-find-their-way-health