What began as a car-seat check 15 years ago has led to the creation of the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy, an innovative Greenville Health System-led partnership whose audacious goal is to improve the well-being of all children in S.C. through targeted research and intervention. The institute, one of a handful of similar efforts in the US, could help pave the way for national changes in pediatric care.
Listen as Kerry Sease, MD, MPH, Pediatrician and Medical Director of the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health & Advocacy, part of GHS Children's Hospital, discusses The Bradshaw Institute's unique scope that extends care "beyond hospital walls" and into the community with a mission to promote child and family wellness and advance child health through education and research.
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The Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health & Advocacy
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She received her medical degree from the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in 1998. She then completed her Pediatric residency at the Greenville Health System in 2001.
Learn more about Kerry K. Sease, MD
Kerry K. Sease, MD
Kerry Sease, MD, MPH, is a Pediatrician and Medical Director of the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health & Advocacy, part of GHS Children's HospitalShe received her medical degree from the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in 1998. She then completed her Pediatric residency at the Greenville Health System in 2001.
Learn more about Kerry K. Sease, MD
Transcription:
Melanie Cole (Host): Historically, children's hospitals have served patients once symptoms of a condition or injury have occurred. Anticipating and preventing the onset of childhood illness and injury is a relatively new paradigm that requires ingenuity and collaboration beyond the traditional medical delivery system. My guest today is Dr. Kerry Sease. She's a pediatrician, and the medical director of the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy, part of GHS Children's Hospital. Welcome to the show, Dr. Sease. What is the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy? Tell us about your mission.
Dr. Kerry Sease (Guest): Sure, great. Thank you so much for having me. So, as you mentioned, the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy is part of the Greenville Health System Children's Hospital, and it serves the GHS community by extending care for children and families really beyond the hospital walls and add them to our community, working to coordinate prevention and health promotion initiatives and really facilitate the healthcare delivery that we give. It's comprised of five performance teams. We have child abuse prevention, healthy child development, injury prevention, school health, and community pediatrics. All of them working together to promote child and family wellness and advancing child health through education and research.
Melanie: So how does it work? How is the Bradshaw Institute getting out into the community? What are you actually doing?
Dr. Sease: So, our aim is to really create optimal health for all children that we serve in our area, and so, to ensure this vision is met, we work really across interdisciplinary services. We engage in research and impact measurements that we can better establish a standard of care for children and their families in our communities. We also offer a variety of training opportunities for trainees across disciplines so we can provide this environment of education and work-force development. So, we're out working with community partners, with the schools -- any agency that really wants to engage in child health, we're out there helping and working with them. Really hoping to reduce the financial impact of the region's healthcare; making sure that we use our resources wisely, and really with the goal of keeping children healthier and hopefully making some of their medical interventions even unnecessary, and all of this will really hinge on the fact that we perform some research while we're doing this as well, so we can provide proof of the benefits of our programs to our community.
Melanie: So, speaking of proof of the benefits, what impact have you seen that it has on the community?
Dr. Sease: Well, I think that would be -- it's very wide. So, if you look at the five performance teams, each of them have their own scorecards that we're developing in looking at and actually looking at that impact to see what we have. We have reduced death by unintentional injury from car seats basically by making sure that they're installed correctly. We have Buddy's Safe House that we look at to make sure children understand that their homes are safe. We have donor boards -- donor life jacket boards -- we have a lot of lakes in our region, and so those are those there. We do mandated reporting for training so people understand and recognize the signs of child abuse. The school health programs where we’re doing health promotion as well put clinics in the schools. We have a very expansive healthy child development program so, the impact is great in terms of the collaboration that we have with the communities and then even more so we're looking to really document those numbers to be able to say to the community, you know, this is the direct health impact that we have had.
Melanie: Name one thing, Dr. Sease that you can point to that has had that direct impact. Speak of a case or a situation where you've really helped somebody that you're very proud of.
Dr. Sease: Gosh. Picking one is hard. I think the child passenger safety program is probably one that has the longest impact in our community. We have permanent sitting stations where we can have children and their families come and get their car seat inspected to make sure it's installed properly. Eight out of ten car seats are installed improperly in this country, and we have -- we can boast now that we have decreased death by car seats that are not installed properly by a drop in that by greater than 50%, so I mean, I think those are just huge numbers to be able to say that.
The school health program, I think, is also one that I'm incredibly proud of. We have a nurse practitioner in four of our most at-risk middle schools, and we're able to provide direct acute care in that setting, but more importantly, we're able to screen these kids for a lot of the adverse childhood experiences that have happened to them in their life and plug them in with resources in the community -- really giving them a trusted source of somebody to come in and talk to who will be able to ask the right questions, but more importantly, put them in contact with resources that they need.
Melanie: What an amazing program and certainly something that can help the community directly. What does the future look like for the Bradshaw Institute? What are you hoping to accomplish in the next five years?
Dr. Sease: That is a great question. I think as we think about the paradigm shift in population health and prevention, we think about the word in pediatrics -- we use the term creating health. So, I think creating health for children in our communities is going to require us to really rewrite the narrative on health beyond the traditional healthcare provider. So, I trained to see patients in an office, and now we're having to train our residents and medical students to think about taking care of their patients outside of the walls of the hospital. So, to do that, we really have to think about a continuum of care. You have to provide solutions that work, really looking at health through a relational end, not only through the medical providers, but to the communities that they serve -- how do we collaborate better with them, and I think the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy is going to serve as the catalyst in our community -- our pediatric community -- to really optimize child health and development. We're going to focus on reduction of high-cost care and ultimately foster a healthy child into a healthy adult. So, that's where I see us going. We have a lot of work ahead, but I think we have the right infrastructure in place to be able to do that.
Melanie: What can you tell us about the Bradshaw family?
Dr. Sease: So, William and Annette Bradshaw, they saw a need to really build a safer and healthier community. They helped establish the first car seat check at his automotive dealership in Greer, and through a small support that he gave to do that grew into the institute that now bears their name. They're really well-known in the upstate for their philanthropy, and they've been recognized nationally for their work advocating for children, mostly through Safe Kids, and now -- they saw the need to give back to the community once more. They really see that helping children and their families is very important. They've seen first-hand really how that prevention outreach works through having those car seat fitting stations at their dealership, and so something that simple, he said, we see that it saves lives, and they recognized the need and a quote from them, you know, "Can you imagine how much more the community and the state we can achieve through this kind of innovative approach," speaking about the Bradshaw Institute and recognized the need to expand care to families outside of the four walls of the hospital and really reaching into the community.
Melanie: So, wrap it up for us, Dr. Sease -- what you want the listeners to know about the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy.
Dr. Sease: I think, what I want them to know is that if you are in our area, in Greenville or the GHS Regional footprint, if you have a question about child health, the Bradshaw Institute should be your go-to place to get that, whether you're a provider, a new family in the area, a community member, a collaborator with us who is interested in this. We want this to be the home of child health and really want to be able to be thought as that catalyst for change in our community around child health.
Melanie: Thank you so much for being with us today. It's really great information, and for more information on the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy, you can go to ghs.org. That's ghs.org. You're listening to Inside Health with Greenville Health System. This is Melanie Cole. Have a great day. Thanks for listening.
Melanie Cole (Host): Historically, children's hospitals have served patients once symptoms of a condition or injury have occurred. Anticipating and preventing the onset of childhood illness and injury is a relatively new paradigm that requires ingenuity and collaboration beyond the traditional medical delivery system. My guest today is Dr. Kerry Sease. She's a pediatrician, and the medical director of the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy, part of GHS Children's Hospital. Welcome to the show, Dr. Sease. What is the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy? Tell us about your mission.
Dr. Kerry Sease (Guest): Sure, great. Thank you so much for having me. So, as you mentioned, the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy is part of the Greenville Health System Children's Hospital, and it serves the GHS community by extending care for children and families really beyond the hospital walls and add them to our community, working to coordinate prevention and health promotion initiatives and really facilitate the healthcare delivery that we give. It's comprised of five performance teams. We have child abuse prevention, healthy child development, injury prevention, school health, and community pediatrics. All of them working together to promote child and family wellness and advancing child health through education and research.
Melanie: So how does it work? How is the Bradshaw Institute getting out into the community? What are you actually doing?
Dr. Sease: So, our aim is to really create optimal health for all children that we serve in our area, and so, to ensure this vision is met, we work really across interdisciplinary services. We engage in research and impact measurements that we can better establish a standard of care for children and their families in our communities. We also offer a variety of training opportunities for trainees across disciplines so we can provide this environment of education and work-force development. So, we're out working with community partners, with the schools -- any agency that really wants to engage in child health, we're out there helping and working with them. Really hoping to reduce the financial impact of the region's healthcare; making sure that we use our resources wisely, and really with the goal of keeping children healthier and hopefully making some of their medical interventions even unnecessary, and all of this will really hinge on the fact that we perform some research while we're doing this as well, so we can provide proof of the benefits of our programs to our community.
Melanie: So, speaking of proof of the benefits, what impact have you seen that it has on the community?
Dr. Sease: Well, I think that would be -- it's very wide. So, if you look at the five performance teams, each of them have their own scorecards that we're developing in looking at and actually looking at that impact to see what we have. We have reduced death by unintentional injury from car seats basically by making sure that they're installed correctly. We have Buddy's Safe House that we look at to make sure children understand that their homes are safe. We have donor boards -- donor life jacket boards -- we have a lot of lakes in our region, and so those are those there. We do mandated reporting for training so people understand and recognize the signs of child abuse. The school health programs where we’re doing health promotion as well put clinics in the schools. We have a very expansive healthy child development program so, the impact is great in terms of the collaboration that we have with the communities and then even more so we're looking to really document those numbers to be able to say to the community, you know, this is the direct health impact that we have had.
Melanie: Name one thing, Dr. Sease that you can point to that has had that direct impact. Speak of a case or a situation where you've really helped somebody that you're very proud of.
Dr. Sease: Gosh. Picking one is hard. I think the child passenger safety program is probably one that has the longest impact in our community. We have permanent sitting stations where we can have children and their families come and get their car seat inspected to make sure it's installed properly. Eight out of ten car seats are installed improperly in this country, and we have -- we can boast now that we have decreased death by car seats that are not installed properly by a drop in that by greater than 50%, so I mean, I think those are just huge numbers to be able to say that.
The school health program, I think, is also one that I'm incredibly proud of. We have a nurse practitioner in four of our most at-risk middle schools, and we're able to provide direct acute care in that setting, but more importantly, we're able to screen these kids for a lot of the adverse childhood experiences that have happened to them in their life and plug them in with resources in the community -- really giving them a trusted source of somebody to come in and talk to who will be able to ask the right questions, but more importantly, put them in contact with resources that they need.
Melanie: What an amazing program and certainly something that can help the community directly. What does the future look like for the Bradshaw Institute? What are you hoping to accomplish in the next five years?
Dr. Sease: That is a great question. I think as we think about the paradigm shift in population health and prevention, we think about the word in pediatrics -- we use the term creating health. So, I think creating health for children in our communities is going to require us to really rewrite the narrative on health beyond the traditional healthcare provider. So, I trained to see patients in an office, and now we're having to train our residents and medical students to think about taking care of their patients outside of the walls of the hospital. So, to do that, we really have to think about a continuum of care. You have to provide solutions that work, really looking at health through a relational end, not only through the medical providers, but to the communities that they serve -- how do we collaborate better with them, and I think the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy is going to serve as the catalyst in our community -- our pediatric community -- to really optimize child health and development. We're going to focus on reduction of high-cost care and ultimately foster a healthy child into a healthy adult. So, that's where I see us going. We have a lot of work ahead, but I think we have the right infrastructure in place to be able to do that.
Melanie: What can you tell us about the Bradshaw family?
Dr. Sease: So, William and Annette Bradshaw, they saw a need to really build a safer and healthier community. They helped establish the first car seat check at his automotive dealership in Greer, and through a small support that he gave to do that grew into the institute that now bears their name. They're really well-known in the upstate for their philanthropy, and they've been recognized nationally for their work advocating for children, mostly through Safe Kids, and now -- they saw the need to give back to the community once more. They really see that helping children and their families is very important. They've seen first-hand really how that prevention outreach works through having those car seat fitting stations at their dealership, and so something that simple, he said, we see that it saves lives, and they recognized the need and a quote from them, you know, "Can you imagine how much more the community and the state we can achieve through this kind of innovative approach," speaking about the Bradshaw Institute and recognized the need to expand care to families outside of the four walls of the hospital and really reaching into the community.
Melanie: So, wrap it up for us, Dr. Sease -- what you want the listeners to know about the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy.
Dr. Sease: I think, what I want them to know is that if you are in our area, in Greenville or the GHS Regional footprint, if you have a question about child health, the Bradshaw Institute should be your go-to place to get that, whether you're a provider, a new family in the area, a community member, a collaborator with us who is interested in this. We want this to be the home of child health and really want to be able to be thought as that catalyst for change in our community around child health.
Melanie: Thank you so much for being with us today. It's really great information, and for more information on the Bradshaw Institute for Community Child Health and Advocacy, you can go to ghs.org. That's ghs.org. You're listening to Inside Health with Greenville Health System. This is Melanie Cole. Have a great day. Thanks for listening.
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