Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

High quality early education programs can boost children’s health. But to do so, these programs need to build partnerships with health care providers.

To explore this idea, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop last year called “Exploring Early Childhood Care and Education Levers to Improve Population Health.” And last month, the National Academies released a report on the workshop.

“By weaving health promotion, preventive care, health literacy, and health care coordination into early care and education environments and making it easier for both health care providers and early care and education providers to coordinate and cooperate through policy levers, we can change the health status of entire geographies of children,” the report says, summing up the ideas of Debbie Chang, a member of the workshop’s planning committee and the Senior Vice President of Policy and Prevention at Nemours Children’s Health System.

Among the many challenges that workshop participants discussed are:

• the need to focus more on the role that health care can play in preventing disparities in early child development and school readiness

• the fact that very young children lack sufficient access to appropriate behavioral health support and to mental health professionals who are trained in trauma-informed care

• economic insecurity is a significant concern among those in the early care and education workforce

• building programs that are financially sustainable, and

• breaking down the silos that make it tough for early education and health care providers to collaborate with each other.

Some of this work is already being done.

At the federal level, Head Start incorporates health services into its early education programs.

In New York City, a program called ParentCorps is embedded in city preschools. Based at NYU Langone (New York University’s School of Medicine), ParentCorps is embedded in New York City schools and provides a training program for parents, professional development for staff, and a program for pre-K children.

“ParentCorps is facilitated by school-based mental health professionals who can create supportive and inspiring spaces in which parents, teachers and staff feel valued, respected and motivated to work together to help children succeed.”

In the northeast, the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children is “is working to ensure that every Vermont child has access to high-quality, affordable child care by 2025.” Part of this includes “working on integrating health care and child care,” the report says, adding:

“… the pattern of actual spending is exactly opposite to the return on investment—in Vermont and everywhere else. In Vermont the public investment per child for infants and toddlers (age 0 to 2 years) is $903, for preschoolers (age 3 to 5 years) is $3,578, and for school-aged children (6 to 19 years) is $18,000.”

Nationally, Child Care Aware has launched Healthy Child Care, Healthy Communities, an effort to work “with six state teams to examine opportunities to enhance standards around healthy, active living.” Those states are: Alabama, Colorado, Indiana, Missouri, New York, and North Carolina.

The next steps?

“One of the goals of the roundtable is to think about how to take the best ideas and support the field in turning them into reality,” the report notes. That will mean making the case for partnerships, encouraging cross-sector dialogues, and working on funding and sustainability.

More and better adult collaboration can build a healthier world for kids.