Academic children’s hospitals must embrace advocacy as a central component of their missions to discover new knowledge and improve the health of the communities and patients they serve. To do so, they must ensure faculty have both the tools and the opportunities to develop and articulate the work of advocacy as an academic endeavor. This can be accomplished by integrating the work of advocacy at the community and policy-change levels into the traditional value systems of academic medicine, especially the promotions process, to establish its legitimacy. Academic pediatric institutions can support this transformation through robust training and professional development programs and establishing opportunities, resources, and leadership positions in advocacy. The adoption of an advocacy portfolio can be used to align these activities and accomplishments to institutional values and promotion. This alignment is crucial to supporting the advocacy work of pediatricians at a time in which community engagement and systems and policy change must be added to professional activities to ensure optimal outcomes for all children.
The New Jersey Pediatric Residency Advocacy Collaborative (NJPRAC) is a statewide collaborative with faculty leads from each of the 10 New Jersey pediatric residency programs. The 2 major goals of the collaborative were to build community partnerships between pediatric residency programs and local organizations and develop a core advocacy curriculum. In this article, we focus on how the NJPRAC built community partnerships with Family Success Centers (FSCs) across the state over the course of a 2-year period. FSCs are located within every county in the state and fall under the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, providing resources and supports for families in crisis, with a focus on child abuse prevention services. Amid this growing partnership, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic forced the NJPRAC to swiftly pivot its partnership and develop innovative programs to support families during the COVID-19 pandemic. As FSC leadership communicated families’ concerns to the collaborative, we initiated the Virtual House Call webinar, which incorporated pediatricians, community leaders, and allied health professionals to answer COVID-19 questions. These webinars quickly expanded into weekly interprofessional series, with experts in mental health, law, nutrition, and dentistry partnering with pediatricians from various subspecialties. Key to the webinars’ success was responding in real time to audience questions, collaborating with the FSC leadership on content, and garnering the support from the local New Jersey Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics and the national American Academy of Pediatrics. A key challenge remains to meaningfully incorporate pediatric trainees into community partnerships. The NJPRAC plans to continue the Virtual House Call series with continuous input from the FSCs and participating families.
Key Points
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