Child and Adolescent Health

The Division of Child and Adolescent Health is dedicated to improving the health of children and adolescents in Northern Manhattan, and to defining model programs for the care of high risk children everywhere. Working in collaboration with local partners, we provide comprehensive, high quality clinical and community health programs. These programs are the foundation for high quality training for health care professionals, teaching them to be excellent clinicians with a solid grounding in primary care pediatrics and community health. We expect our graduates to lead research, advocacy and educational efforts that will address the important child and adolescent health issues of our time.

The anchor program of the Division is the Child and Adolescent Health Group Practice (GPGP), a model faculty practice and the largest provider of care to children in northern Manhattan. Established in 1978 as a small hospital based practice, GPGP has evolved into the largest single provider of pediatric primary care in northern Manhattan. Staffed by over 30 full-time faculty and 60 pediatric housestaff, the GPGP provides primary care to more than 22,000 children generating over 68,000 visits per year. These ambulatory services take place in four community practices operated by the Ambulatory Care Network of New York Presbyterian Hospital. GPGP attendings provide continuity of care across the ambulatory and inpatient settings. GPGP is recognized as an outstanding model for urban pediatric primary care. The attending physicians of GPGP are the core faculty for the resident continuity clinics and staff the General Pediatric inpatient service of Children’s Hospital of New York. The faculty have experts in the fields of community health, child maltreatment, adolescent medicine, and children with special health care needs.

The Hospitalist Service is in the second year of operation. Hospitalist provide 30% of the attending coverage on the General Medicine in-patient service with plans for expansion to full coverage. The patient population is made up of healthy children with acute problems, and increasingly medically complex multidisciplinary children. Hospitalists provide care coordination for these children, as well as providing input for other medically fragile inpatients. Educating residents is a top priority as the ward service is an important teaching service for pediatric residents. As the service evolves, we anticipate the length of stay for inpatients to decrease, resource utilization to decrease, and communication with primary pediatricians to improve.

The Section of Adolescent Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital supports a variety of clinical programs for adolescents, training opportunities for students, residents and fellows, and a broad array of research initiatives geared to improving the health of adolescents and young adults everywhere. Clinical programs at Columbia include an academic Adolescent Medicine primary care practice, a large school-based health center system, a family planning clinic, a practice specifically geared to young men’s health, a clinic for at-risk and HIV-positive youth, and an inpatient Adolescent Medicine consult service. Adolescent Medicine trained and board-certified faculty members are integrally involved in these clinical programs, as well as in the section’s research, advocacy, and training initiatives. Additionally, the program supports an ACGME-accredited Adolescent Medicine Fellowship.

Community Pediatrics has a long standing history of working collaboratively with agencies and stakeholders in the Washington Heights Inwood community to address a range of challenging health problems in the surrounding neighborhood. By developing partnerships, the community and the Medical Center can benefit from each other’s strengths and abilities in order to optimize child health outcomes, and ensuring that services are more closely aligned with the community’s self-perceived needs.