Topical Review: Building Competency: Professional Skills for Pediatric Psychologists in Integrated Primary Care Settings

Objectives In the midst of large-scale changes across our nation’s health care system, including the Affordable Care Act and Patient-Centered Medical Home initiatives, integrated primary care models afford important opportunities for those in the field of pediatric psychology. Despite the extensive and growing attention, this subspecialty has received in recent years, a comprehensive set of core professional competencies has not been established. Methods A subset of an Integrated Primary Care Special Interest Group used two well-established sets of core competencies in integrated primary care and pediatric psychology as a basis to develop a set of integrated pediatric primary care-specific behavioral anchors. Conclusions The current manuscript describes these behavioral anchors and their development in the context of professional training as well as with regard to Triple Aim goals and securing psychology’s role in integrated pediatric primary care settings

It Takes a Village: Multidisciplinary Approach to Screening and Prevention of Pediatric Sleep Issues

Sleep is essential to human development. Poor sleep can have significant effects on cognition, learning and memory, physical and behavioral health, and social-emotional well-being. This paper highlights the prevalence of common pediatric sleep problems and posits that a multidisciplinary approach to the assessment and intervention of sleep problems is ideal. Primary care providers are often the first professionals to discuss sleep issues with youth and families. However, dentists, otolaryngologists, childcare providers, school personnel, and behavioral health providers have a vital role in screening and prevention, providing intervention, and monitoring the progress of daily functioning. The strengths of this approach include better provider-to-provider and provider-to-family communication, streamlined assessment and intervention, earlier identification of sleep issues with more efficient referral, and longer-term monitoring of progress and impact on daily functioning. Barriers to this approach include difficulty initiating and maintaining collaboration among providers, limited provider time to obtain the necessary patient permission to collaborate among all multidisciplinary providers, lack of financial support for consultation and collaboration outside of seeing patients face-to-face, geographic location, and limited resources within communities. Research investigating the utility of this model and the overall impact on pediatric patient sleep issues is warranted and strongly encouraged