The SPOT in St. Louis, Missouri, provides a comfortable homelike environment where adolescents can drop-in for food and social services in addition to receiving comprehensive health services from Wash U’s clinical care team.
Pediatricians report considerable interest in expanding preventive, mental health, and reproductive health services for adolescents and in making their practices more adolescent-friendly, but financial and institutional reforms are necessary to achieve these changes.
Achieving meaningful health reform for adolescents will require coverage expansions under Medicaid and CHIP, appropriately designed benefits, delivery system and payment improvements, and training supports.
Health system reform presents an important opportunity for preventing and better managing physical, behavioral, and reproductive health conditions that are common in adolescence and can have lifelong consequences.
Few pediatric practices are offering the needed support services to enable adolescents with special needs to effectively transition to adult health care.
