Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The Baton Rouge Children’s Health Project (BRCHP), a collaboration between Children’s Health Fund and Health Centers in Schools at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, was formed as part of the initial disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, and continues to deliver compassionate, high-quality care to children who live in under-resourced neighborhoods and lack medical services in East Baton Rouge Parish where they live, play, and learn. Through a long-term commitment in the area, BRCHP has become a trusted health organization with the local residents. Their expertise in providing high-quality, culturally-sensitive care to children in need in the region fills an essential gap. The BRCHP provides critically needed medical, mental health, and health education support services to children and families in East Baton Rouge Parish. The program makes healthcare available to 41,000 students attending local public schools throughout the community. In these schools, approximately 80% of children live below the federal poverty line. The BRCHP team–staffed with a pediatrician, registered nurse, pediatric clinical psychologists, licensed clinical social worker, and a health educator–helps families mitigate barriers related to transportation and insurance by bringing services directly to schools and community events, which helps decrease missed work for parents and missed school time for children. This model is effective because it approaches health holistically by including the patient, family, school, and community. The school-based medical team, provides ongoing care to students with chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and sickle cell disorder. The team also provides vision and hearing care, including 25,000 vision screenings and 22,500 hearing screenings a year. The team continues to provide long-term disaster recovery support services from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to the 2016 flooding and COVID-19. The mobile clinics allow the team to respond to any emergency in the Baton Rouge region, and the team’s expertise in disaster recovery continues to meet basic needs for families, engage teachers and administration on the students’ feelings of loss, provide ongoing mental health care, and link displaced families to resources.

Working with historically underinvested communities: The target population for this project is children living in low-resource communities, ages 0-24 years; this includes people without insurance, underinsured people, and families who have limited or no access to pediatric care. Seventy-nine percent of the clinic’s patients have Medicaid, 10% are uninsured, and 78% of patients receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.