The health care system should be fully committed to serving children and their families. Prioritizing their specific needs is crucial for their lifelong health and well-being. The medical community is concentrating on preventive measures and the relationships between children, families, communities, and the systems they frequently interact with. Despite substantial efforts in the field of child health care, there is a consensus that the transformation of child health, with an emphasis on family-centered pediatric care, needs to speed up.

In this episode of the Charting Pediatrics podcast, from Children’s Hospital Colorado, Hala Durrah, a consultant and advocate for patient-family engagement, shares her work in patient- and family-centered care, which was influenced by her personal experience as a mother of a child who has undergone two liver transplants and a bone marrow transplant.

Hala is part of a national advisory group guiding Accelerating Child Health Transformation (ACHT), an initiative led by the Center for Health Care Strategies with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that is seeking to accelerate the adoption of key elements necessary to advance family-centered pediatric practice. Through ACHT, the Child Health Clinic at Children’s Hospital Colorado recently participated in a year-long pilot program to identify and test policy and practice change aimed at advancing child health transformation.