Keeping the Heat on for Children’s Health: A Successful Medical–Legal Partnership Initiative to Prevent Utility Shutoffs in Vulnerable Children

Description

Energy insecurity may result in adverse consequences for children’s health, particularly for children with special health needs or chronic health conditions. Working within a medical-legal partnership, an urban hospital-based pediatric practice standardized criteria for providers approving medical need utility certification requests. Authors compared prior-year utility certification requests and approvals (pre-intervention) with the intervention year for families who reported energy insecurity on a waiting-room screening questionnaire. Between the first and second years of the study, certification of medical need approvals increased by 65 percent, preventing utility shut-offs for 396 more families with vulnerable children. The findings were published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.

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Authors

• Daniel Taylor

• Bruce Bernstein

• Eileen Carroll

• Elizabeth Oquendo

• Linda Peyton

• Lee Pachter