Community Pediatrics and Advocacy (CPAP)
What is advocacy?
Advocacy is any attitude or idea, strategy or set of behaviors that has a specific goal to improve the physical, emotional or environmental condition of an individual child or adolescent, their family or their community. The goals of child advocacy include:
- Achieving social justice for youth
- Empowering families
- Assisting communities to support the healthy development of children and adolescents
The role of the advocate is to speak on behalf of youth and to empower them to speak for themselves. Advocates work to affect the condition of an individual, either directly or indirectly, by fostering the health of families, communities and populations.
The CPAP mission
The Community Pediatrics and Advocacy Program (CPAP) teaches residents to become pediatricians who are as comfortable and competent in their role as child advocates as they are in the medical practice, who can be effective advocates for an individual child and family, as well as all children in their community, and who can work in partnership with private and public community-based agencies to promote the well-being of children. Through this educational process, we integrate an expanded focus on community-based pediatrics and advocacy through the Hospital.
Community-based pediatrics and advocacy
The advocacy curriculum spans the three years of the residency. In the first two years, residents gain exposure to various advocacy topics and issues and develop core advocacy skills. In addition to lectures, workshops, activities, and site visits related to advocacy topics, residents gain clinical experience in developmental pediatrics and adolescent medicine.
Other activities include community-based advocacy experience as well as building skills such as lobbying, media training, coalition building and advocating for children in a managed care system. In the third year of residency, trainees apply core advocacy skills to project development. These residents also participate in and lead various advocacy activities, including conferences and journal club meetings.
Through the CPAP, CHOP residents have initiated and continued free pediatric clinics in several of Philadelphia's homeless shelters. Still maintained and staffed entirely by volunteer residents and nurses of the Hospital and medical students from the University of Pennsylvania, the Homeless Health Initiative (HHI) clinics administer routine screenings, vaccinations and regular check-ups, ushering homeless children into a system of continuity of pediatric care. The shelters' families welcome this care for their children and the residents report invaluable experience in working with a needy population.
Other projects have included surveys of health care needs in Philadelphia, production of educational materials for families and patients, and creation of programs in the city's libraries and school systems related to literacy, health education and exercise.
Get more information:
Pediatric Residency Program
- 215-590-2437
