Community health and advocacy training in pediatrics: Using asset-based community development for sustainability

摘要

Pediatricians play a critical role in promoting the health of all children, and community health and child advocacy experiences are now a required component of pediatric residency training. Since the 1999 initiation of the University of California Davis pediatric residency program's Communities and Health Professionals Together (CHPT) partnership, the CHPT's scope has expanded to include training of residents from the Departments of Family and Community Medicine and Internal Medicine, as well as students from the Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health.Previously, CHPT was a 2-week annual experience, focused in a single community and culminating in a project.6"8 We worked collaboratively with our community partners to make a major curricular change based on program evaluations from pediatric residents and community faculty. CHPT is now a 4-week, topic-based experience for first-year residents, with those who elect to develop an advocacy project receiving additional 4-week experiences in the second and third years (Table; available at www.jpeds.com). Community and academic faculty developed an exhaustive list of potential topics from which community faculty identified their "expert" topic and then worked with academic faculty to plan didactics, readings, educational activities, and reflective exercises. Here we share lessons learned from CHPT for the sustainability of a robust community health and advocacy training program applying asset-based community development (ABCD), a strengths-based approach to building strong communities by identifying and mobilizing local assets.