Partnering With Existing Early Childhood Developmental Screening Initiatives
This webinar focuses on how to partner with early childhood developmental screening initiatives across community sectors and features specific examples in California and Wisconsin.
Screening is critical for positive early childhood development outcomes – but health care providers can face barriers in implementing screening. In this webinar, presenters share their experiences with partnering across sectors for screening initiatives in their communities and highlight how to leverage local opportunities and create stronger communication between the medical home and broader early childhood system.
This webinar is designed for early childhood health care providers, community-based organizations involved in early childhood developmental screening, public health workers, and early childhood system leaders. The learning objectives are to:
- Summarize the variety of settings in which screening may be occurring locally.
- Describe how screening and referral practices can take form and apply in various ways.
- Identify current screening methods and best practices that may be leveraged to support local screening efforts.
Key Takeaways
- It is important to partner with developmental screening initiatives for several reasons, including:
- Families with young children exist everywhere, meaning they interact with a variety of settings, such as doctors’ offices, child care spaces, home visiting programs, community-based organizations, and more.
- Screening happens in multiple places. Aligning efforts can help make screening more universal, create a more seamless experience for families, minimize duplication, ensure that different parts of the system act as a team for families, allow for universal messaging on developmental promotion, right-size workforce capacity, and minimize costs.
- There are multiple local programs and initiatives that offer screening or can help find who does offer screening nearby, including:
- The local Child Care Resource and Referral Agency that supports child care providers and may know of screening programs.
- The county/state Child Find (IDEA Part B/C) administrator to learn more about Child Find practices.
- Programs with locations and affiliates across the country, including Early Head Start/Head Start, HealthySteps, Help Me Grow, and home visiting programs.
- Title V to see action plans for states that have prioritized developmental screening as a performance measure.
- Critical approaches for helping young children and families flourish include:
- A “through any door” approach to ensure the universal provision of comprehensive, personalized, whole-child, and family preventive and developmental services.
- Real engagement where families access services that are personalized to their own goals and informed by their lived expertise.
- Seamless systems where all early childhood systems intentionally collaborate to promote well-being, optimize early identification of concerns, and address social, health, and relational goals and needs.
Examples of Screening Partnerships in California and Wisconsin
Help Me Grow Orange County (OC) – OC Children’s Screening Registry
- Help Me Grow OC in California created the OC Children’s Screening Registry, a free online database for primary health care and community-based providers to view and enter developmental, behavioral, and trauma screening.
- The intent of the registry, administered by Help Me Grow OC as part of Children’s Hospital of Orange County, is to communicate screening results between organizations and health care providers.
- For the registry, Help Me Grow OC has partnered with community-based organizations, child health care providers, and school districts.
- As of May 2024, over 106,000 unique children and 293,000 screenings have been entered in the registry.
Help Me Grow Wisconsin – Resource Navigators in Rural Settings
- Help Me Grow Wisconsin places resource navigators in programs where parents are naturally accessing screening services. Navigators are experienced in early childhood, assign referrals and follow-up as recommended, record data in a central database, and have continuous communication with families until the age of 5.
- Through a project supported by the Alliance for Healthier Wisconsin, Help Me Grow Wisconsin placed navigators directly in a health system in five rural counties to help break down siloes between community-based programs and health care systems.
- Over the course of the 18 months of the project, there were significant increases in development screenings, risk identification, and connection to services.
Featured Speakers
Rebecca Hernandez, MSEd
Manager, Help Me Grow Orange County
Barb Tengesdal, PhD
Executive Director, First 5 Fox Valley and Help Me Grow Wisconsin
Jennifer Koop, PhD, ABPP
Pediatric Neuropsychologist, Children’s Wisconsin, and Professor, Medical College of Wisconsin
Melissa Passarelli, MA
Associate Director of Implementation and System-Building, Help Me Grow National Center
