NYS Developmental Disabilites Planning Council Awards Funds for Health Education Training Curriculum

George E. Fertal, Sr., Chairperson, today announced that on March 12, 2009 the New York State Developmental Disabilities Planning Council (DDPC) awarded $35,000 to Elmhurst Hospital Center, South Nassau Family Health Center, and the Institute for Urban Family Health continue the Parent Partners in Health Education Training Curriculum (PPHE) and $40,000 to COGME to provide technical assistance and evaluation of the PPHE program.

Currently medical residents receive very limited exposure to individuals with disabilities and often lack an understanding of how a disability affects a family and what community resources are available. The PPHE curriculum seeks to help medical residents gain a greater understanding of disability issues by giving them more direct contacts with caregivers. An important feature of the program is a series of interviews between residents and parents of children with disabilities or individuals with disabilities and staff from residential programs. The interviews help residents to understand the experience of raising a child with a disability from the perspective of the family and the strengths and needs of adults with a disability. Other elements of the program, including didactic lectures, community agency interviews, and clinical experiences, help provide residents with the comprehensive training they need to serve all their patients equally.

The PPHE program has proven to be a great success in the hospitals in which it has been implemented. Parent Partners have been enthusiastic in their support for the program and the home visits provide residents with a new perspective and sensitivity to the challenges faced by families. The hospitals involved plan to incorporate the components of the PPHE program into their ongoing medical resident training and some faculty have already been assisting in the lecture preparation and presentations. Project evaluation will be used in the development of a customized PPHE model for New York State that can be shared with primary care residency programs throughout the state and beyond so that PPHE components will become part of the core requirements of all primary care medical residents.

Dr. Sandowski, from the South Nassau Communities Hospital, shares with us the success they have been having so far with the PPHE curriculum. "The DDPC - Parent Partner program started at South Nassau Communities Hospital in April 2007. It was created because the physicians here recognized that we had a paucity of understanding and training in caring for children with developmental disabilities. The program was a wonderful opportunity to have the Family Medicine faculty and the Family Medicine residents simultaneously trained in this area of medicine. We partnered with United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) of Nassau County, who serves as a tremendous resource for both educational opportunities and patient encounters. In the first year of the program we provided didactic, educational lectures; small group discussions; case presentations; and reflection sessions. Each physician (resident and faculty) was partnered with a family who has a child with developmental disabilities. Home visits and visits to the child's school and support agency were discussed at the reflection session and via the intradepartmental, intranet based web-logs of our encounters. Clinical rotations were created for the residents at the UCP medical home, and exposure to their myriad of clinics (medicine, gynecology, dental, psychiatry, rehab, occupational, etc.) proved to be exciting for all participants. The year culminated with a 5 hour, continuing medical education (CME) symposium in caring for children with developmental disabilities. There were over 70 participants from 10 different institutions that had attended. This year, we continue to partner with our families, provide the clinical experiences, and expanded our didactic series to include autism, ADHD, in addition to "refresher" lectures on topics encountered last year (such as screening, access to care, legal issues, unique medical problems - to name a few). Additionally we were highlighted for our success at the Northeast conference of the Society of the Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) in Baltimore, in October 2008. There were physician leaders from around the country who attended, and as a result of the conference, a network of people and organizations interested in caring for people with developmental disabilities is being created."

The DDPC is a federally funded state agency dedicated to designing and implementing new programs that serve New Yorkers with developmental disabilities and their families in the most effective way possible. Sixty percent of the Governor-appointed membership of the DDPC is parents and people with developmental disabilities. For more information on the DDPC, go to: www.ddpc.state.ny.us.