PEDIATRIC PULMONARY TRAINING - Project Description: The Pediatric Pulmonary Center (PPC) aims to provide interdisciplinary training to health care professionals to improve the health of infants, children, and adolescents with chronic respiratory conditions, sleep issues, and other related special health care needs. Faculty and trainees are from medicine, nursing, nutrition, social work, psychology and families. Through the training program, the PPC will provide family-centered care integrated across the inpatient, outpatient, and community-based settings for the highly prevalent respiratory and sleep disorders in children with special health care needs (CYSHCN). Needs: In general, respiratory conditions such as asthma and sleep-related breathing disorders are very common in otherwise healthy children, but even more prevalent in CYSHCN. Growing numbers of CYSHCN have increasingly complex respiratory and sleep conditions that require advanced, comprehensive, and technology-based care, but which currently is not widely available. Most CYSHCN do not have - yet would benefit from - integrated family-centered care, the lack of which has created gaps in care and compromised health outcomes. Much of this is due to the national workforce shortage of pediatric providers trained to provide this level of comprehensive pulmonary care. Clinical leaders in pulmonary care are urgently needed who can navigate the complex health care needs of CYSHCN while prioritizing and advocating for family-centered care, work collaboratively across inpatient, ambulatory and community-based interdisciplinary settings, leverage technology to help provide farther-reaching care, and train future health care professionals, given dwindling workforce but increasing CYSHCN population. Proposed Services: Needs will be addressed through an integrated training program and service deliverables. The training program includes (a) didactic seminars, (b) non-clinical experiential opportunities across the inpatient, outpatient and community settings, (c) leadership and networking activities including health policy and advocacy, (d) clinical practica in interdisciplinary settings across the inpatient, outpatient, and community practices, and (e) research and scholarship. Proposed service deliverables include (1) assembly of interdisciplinary cohorts, leading to an interdisciplinary clinical team that provides family-centered integrated care for CYSHCN across multiple settings, the construction of which will be shaped by a stepwise needs assessment with particular focus on school-based and community health care systems; (2) recruitment of faculty and trainees from a wide variety of backgrounds so as to expand the breadth of future MCH workforce; (3) engagement of people and/or families who have lived experiences with chronic respiratory/sleep conditions with creation of an advisory board and development/dissemination of a toolkit for families of children with medically complex pulmonary conditions; and (4) strengthening of academic-practice partnerships with regional Title V Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant agencies and community partners. Population Group: CYSHCN with chronic pulmonary and/or sleep disorders and their families residing in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and Oregon, with focus on those with historically unmet medical needs.
