Summer vacation is not even half over and I’m already thinking about getting my kids ready to go back-to school. It’s not that I don’t enjoy their company; I just want to get a jump-start on my to-do list so that I deliver them to school ready to learn. Along with back-to-school shopping, they need their annual physicals and 6-month dental check-ups. Child health advocates around the country have another major item on their back-to-school checklists – reaching out to the five million children who are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but are unenrolled.
This is an ideal time of year as the media and huge segments of our population are focused on children’s needs as they prepare to head back to school. The National Covering Kids and Families Network (NCKFN) is helping groups leverage the increased attention to children’s issues during the back-to-school period to help reach enroll eligible children in state Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program plans. They recently hosted a webinar to discuss messaging and strategies that work. (Georgetown CCF is providing technical assistance to NCKFN).
Many of the NCKFN participants and other groups have been working on back-to-school efforts for many years and had a wealth of experience to share with each other. Some excellent messages have been developed for groups working on this initiative by GMMB with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The trick is getting the right messengers to use the messages to reach families of uninsured children. Many of the NCKFN groups have had a lot of success working with school nurses, school administrators, social workers, community outreach workers and teachers. Two participants on the webinar focused on more non-traditional messengers – school board members and youth sport leaders.
First, Donna Cohen Ross, senior advisor to the Office of External Affairs at CMS (and an expert on outreach), announced HHS’s plan to launch a coaches campaign “Get Covered: Get in the Game” which will enlist youth sports leaders to help find uninsured children and get them enrolled (more details on the campaign to come in August). Coaches are great messengers. (Just compare the sports section to the health section of your local newspaper if you doubt the ability of sports leaders to get a message across in your community.) Coaches can pitch a different message to families by linking the importance of coverage with the ability to compete in team sports. As Donna pointed out, there is a strong link between good health care and sports as kids frequently are excluded from school sports participation if they don’t have a physical. Parents are also understandably reluctant to allow children to participate in sports if they aren’t insured for fear of an injury that they can’t afford to treat.
As the mother of three boys, I’m involved with my fair share of youth sports teams and recall one heart-breaking incident when one of my son’s soccer teammates suffered a concussion during a tournament. I offered to drive him and his mother to the hospital but she said she didn’t have insurance so she would just wait to see if he really needed care. No mother should be faced with that choice and coaches could help make sure they are not. Good coaches teach children more than just about sports, they teach them about the importance of teamwork, perseverance, and hard work and they make sure kids are doing as well off the field as they are doing on the field. Youth sports participation helps children learn many valuable life lessons and it is tragic that some children are unable to fully participate in this aspect of childhood due to the lack of insurance coverage – especially for those who are eligible but unenrolled in CHIP or Medicaid.
Second, April Griffin, a school board member from Hillsborough School District in Florida, spoke about the importance of getting buy-in at the top. (In other words – cultivating the grass tops as well as the grass-roots). She pointed out that school district staff and teachers are stretched thin and are under pressure to raise test scores. According to Ms. Griffin, the more groups are able to link children’s health coverage with school performance, the more successful they should be in getting the buy-in of school system personnel.
Her message also hit home. A friend of mine tried to get our school district to include information about our state’s Medicaid and CHIP programs in back-to-school packets. The school district staff refused and said it was against school district policy. My friend appealed to a school board member by pointing out that the school district included promotional materials of for-profit insurance companies in the packets. The school board member was able to look at the “big picture” rather than reading a policy manual and gave the staff person the go-ahead to include the CHIP & Medicaid information in this fall’s packets.
There were a lot more great ideas shared on the NCKFN webinar and I encourage readers to check them out here. In collaboration with the network, Donna Cohen Ross of CMS has scheduled a second webinar on school-based outreach efforts on July 29th. (All those of you who have read Donna’s posts on this blog or have worked with her over the years know that Donna cares deeply about this topic and you won’t want to miss this opportunity.)
