Local Opinion: Children need routine health care visits

As we all try to adjust to the “new normal” that has arisen from the COVID-19 pandemic, one of our biggest concerns must be the health of our children and adolescents.

While not suffering the same extremes of symptomatic COVID-19 as adults, the collateral damage experienced by our pediatric population has been equally bad. Both children and adolescents have experienced huge climbs in rates of depression, anxiety, other mental health diseases and suicide.

Social distancing from the earlier days of the pandemic also cut off access to pediatric primary care providers, and the result was a severe drop in routine vaccinations. It should be no surprise that Arizona has experienced climbing rates of vaccine-preventable infections including pertussis (whooping cough) and pneumonia. Also, we are a short airplane trip away from such active threats as measles, chicken pox, and even polio. All are diseases that can still cause severe disease in the U.S., if given a chance.

Unfortunately, even today the rates of routine well-child visits are nowhere near their pre-pandemic numbers. Arizona is worse than most of the rest of the U.S., ranking 47th in completion of at least one routine well-child visit in 2021.

Critically, it is exactly those routine well-child visits where children and adolescents can receive their routine vaccines, undergo screening for mental health concerns and normal physical and psychosocial development, and be directed to effective treatments for any illnesses identified. For Arizona, this represents yet another crisis, a pandemic behind the pandemic, in which our children and adolescents are at extreme risk for preventable diseases.

Fortunately, the solution to this crisis is not extreme, nor is it costly or “new.” Rather, the same primary-care providers who provided preventive care and anticipatory guidance to our children and teens are still there, waiting with open doors to take care of them and armor them against this new, evolving crisis.

The Arizona Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AzAAP) and its members have been working collaboratively with our local health department and the Arizona Department of Health Services, the School Nurse Association of Arizona, the Department of Education and Arizona School Administrators to create resources that will aim to increase access to routine well-child care for Arizona’s children and adolescents.

A big challenge in this process has been communication between the primary care offices and their patients’ families. Now, a novel partnership between the Arizona Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AzAAP), its members, and the state’s schools has been created, using funding from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

This partnership has created the CACTUS toolkit (Collection of Arizona Covid-19 Tools for Use in Schools), which is filled with resources designed specifically for use by schools and student group to help get the word out about the importance of routine preventive care and immunizations, which can include the COVID-19 vaccine.

The goal of this project is to bring families back to their primary care providers in addition to supplying educational information about COVID-19 prevention to the community. However, these communication resources will only work if parents, caregivers, and family members are open and willing to listen and be receptive to them and their messaging.

So please, for the sake of our children and teens, consider this a call to action to encourage all parents, caretakers and families to take their kids back to the doctor’s office once a year for preventive healthcare.

We need all of Arizona’s children and teens to be given access to routine well-child visits by their families on a regular basis, to get the routine vaccines they need (and consider getting a COVID-19 vaccine while they’re at it), and to be screened for mental health illness and other health concerns … before it’s too late.