Child Health
Child Health
Centers and Initiatives
The Children in Crisis initiative links life-saving child health interventions with political reform. It is the first academic initiative to address the needs of children in areas of unstable governance and civil conflict. Renowned pediatrician Paul Wise, MD, MPH, has been traveling to Guatemala for three decades to work with malnourished children for the Guatemala Rural Child Health and Nutrition Program. His work is believed to have saved hundreds of lives.
Almost half of all preventable child deaths in the world occur in areas of unstable governance or civil conflict, but global efforts to improve child health have largely avoided work in these areas. The Children in Crisis program attacks this issue directly by bringing together Stanford's strength in global security, human rights, and democratization studies with the medical school and other Stanford programs focused on the health and well-being of children. This program creates the first and only university-based capacity to link life-saving child health interventions with the essential political requirements for providing them in the real world.
Marcella Alsan, MD, MPH, Phd, has examined the disparities in health and education between boys and girls in developing countries; Lee Sanders, MD, PhD, is a nationally recognized scholar in the fields of health literacy and child chronic illness. Stanford Health Policy and the Department of Pediatrics recently held a day-long conference about how current immigration policies might affect the health of children of immigrants.
The Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention (CPOP) was established in 2004 as a core program of the Department of Pediatrics to provide a strong foundation for the development of a nationally recognized child health services and policy research program. Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics, heads up the center and is funded by the NIH Director's New Innovator Award and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health to develop new tools for patient engagement and behavioral change via mobile applications. His team is building an application that can help health-care providers, patients, social workers and insurers track the progress of a patient.
Saving Children in Guatemala
Our Children in Crisis Initiative headed up by Stanford pediatrician Dr. Paul Wise seeks to save the lives of children in areas of poor governance and conflict. In Guatemala, their efforts work toward eliminating death by malnutrition for children under 5. As recently as 2005, about one of every 20 children in this rural area of Guatemala died before their 5th birthday; almost half the deaths were associated with severe malnutrition.
