Health clinics and early childhood education programs don’t normally have much to do with each other. But in Kansas City, Missouri, a pediatric clinic run by Children’s Mercy Hospital has been operating out of a Head Start center, Operation Breakthrough, for 20 years. The center serves about 400 kids from 6 weeks to 5 years old on any given day, and about a quarter of them are homeless. Most come from densely populated, low-income neighborhoods where they are routinely exposed to rodents, violence, and poor air quality and have few safe places to walk or play.
A couple of years ago, leaders of the two programs realized that the needs of the children and families they were working with went beyond attending to the flus, infections and injuries of the kids. They decided to deepen their work together, to investigate what the children and families needed, and to try to prevent and address the effects of the adverse experiences so many of the children go through.
[For more of this story, written by Rob Waters, go to http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...s-from-toxic-stress/]
Comments (0)