Study Says Kids Often Don't Get Right Care

[LeighAnn]

Source: KNBC-TV Los Angeles

As Washington debates children's health insurance, a startling study finds that kids who regularly see doctors get the right care less than half the time - whether it's preschool shots or chlamydia tests for teen girls.

The findings, from the first comprehensive look at children's health care quality, are particularly troubling because nearly all the 1,536 children in the nationwide study had insurance.

Eight-two percent were covered by private insurance. Three-quarters were white, and all lived in or near large or midsized cities.

The study, by the Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and the nonprofit Rand Corp. research group, concludes that overall, doctors gave children the appropriate outpatient medical care only 47 percent of the time.

"They got an 'F'," said Dr. Joseph F. Hagan, a Burlington, Vt., pediatrician. Hagan co-edited the American Academy of Pediatrics' latest update to its children's health guidelines, due out later this month.

Read more: http://www.knbc.com/health/14314701/detail.html

[izzie]

1. Half the doctors are in the lower half of the class.

Plus I would think it is how every one gets care. To many things to look at to ever get this field a 100 percent in any thing. Some care I guess would be better than none. Can any one hope for more?

[IndyOp]

2. I wonder whether lack of continuity of care and limited time with each patient

aren't key issues here. I saw the same doctor from the time I was a baby until I was 18-years-old.

If families have to change doctors when their job introduces a new HMO or when they change jobs, if more and more families are using "strip mall" health facilities only after the health situation has become urgent, if families are moving from one town to another more often -- all of these would result in lack of continuity of care. The better the patient and doctor know each other, the better communication would be and the more caring the relationship would be.

And HMO's have been pushing Dr's to speed up and speed up and speed up for decades now --

[LeighAnn]

3. Yeah, I haven't seen the same doctor twice in over 20 years :(

I was never mis-diagnosed the first half of my life. It's happened in life-threatening ways twice since then.

I think med students are over-hazed, a practice which seems to grow worse with each generation. It's so regimented and institutionalized, and you've got to figure the business end is playing in pretty strongly these days.

Dr. Koop said one time that there are muscles in the hand, and that a medical student has to learn the names of every one of them. What a doctor needs to know, though, is what to do if a person can't open and close their hand right, he said. He wrote some good pieces on the subject.

The only doctors that I've been to for a very long time that weren't completely worthless were the ones over 50.

[izzie]

4. What if you had one doctor for years and he was a bad one?

I am over 70 and have had all types of doctors and I am sure some good and some bad. I think you have to give some thought to what they say. Lots of people think their doctor is the best in the world I think they are just doctors and some times make errors. I do not think their age has any thing to do with it. You also know your body pretty well so must think what ever they tell you to fit into what you know about your self.