Home Health Care Policies Are Target of New Foundation Grant

PALO ALTO – Creating better national policies to improve home health care for children with medical complexity is the focus of a grant recently awarded by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. 

Advancing a Family-Centered, Evidence-Based Policy Agenda for Pediatric Home Health Care, a grant to the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Family Voices, aims to generate high-quality evidence regarding how state-level policies affect access to pediatric home health services. This evidence will form the basis for developing a more coherent, accessible system of home health care for children nationally.

Currently, stakeholders interested in advocating for the improvement of home health care services rely on anecdotes and personal stories when making the case to state officials. This project will provide evidence-based products, including two journal articles, a policy brief, fact sheets with state data, and a national webinar that can be employed in advocating for an improved home health care system for children across the country.

This award builds on a previous foundation grant to Lurie Children’s and co-principal investigator Carolyn Foster, MD, MSHS, in which she and her team are developing a measurement instrument to evaluate access to, and quality of, home health care for children with medical complexity. Their initial recommendations for improving pediatric home health care are highlighted in an article in Health Affairs. The new project will be co-led by Family Voices, with Cara Coleman, JD, MPH, as co-principal investigator.

Read more about the new grant.