Summit of Health Care Providers for Adolescents

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Adolescents are often regarded as a healthy population, but they are vulnerable to health risks which are behavioral in nature and potentially preventable. These include risk taking behaviors related to sexual activity and substance abuse, poor nutrition, sedentary lifestyle, and mental health problems. Unintended accidents, homicide, and suicide are the leading causes of death in adolescents. Moreover, the behaviors that contribute most to the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in adults are often initiated in adolescence. Adolescents who are minority, low socioeconomic status, and living in inner cities are at an even higher risk. Several national organizations have developed recognized adolescent preventive services guidelines. Despite much evidence suggesting the importance and potential efficacy of clinical preventive services for adolescents, the delivery of these services falls far behind the national recommendations. Given the great necessity for providing adolescents with preventive health services, and the challenge that providing these services can pose, we would like to arrange a summit for selected leaders within the Montefiore Medical Center community who provide health care to adolescents. This summit would be very timely given that many of the Healthy People 2010 objectives include reducing the adolescent morbidity and mortality that result from preventable high risk behaviors. The purpose of this one day summit is to convene he leaders of providing adolescent health within this health system to identify what adolescent preventive services are currently practiced by each participating clinical site;educate the summit group on current guidelines for adolescent screening/health care to enhance their current knowledge base;;educate the summit group on strategies that have been used previously by other medical groups to arrive at a consensus n provision of these guidelines and develop a consensus so that adolescent preventive services are uniform and at the highest level throughout the Montefiore Medical Center.