AAP Voices Blog

I work in a FQHC on the South Side of Chicago, one of many pediatricians who work day-to-day to provide quality health care to an underserved population. COVID-19 has hit our clinic hard and posed challenges to all of us who work there.

We have completely restructured the way the clinic operates. We have COVID-19 tents outside for testing and screening in order to minimize exposure for staff and well patients. We also have adopted telehealth for some patients.

We are in a section of Chicago that has a very high rate of the disease. About 70% of cases in Chicago are diagnosed in African-Americans, who represent about 30% of the city’s population. Our center’s population is 85% to 90% African-American. So we have lost patients and had staff members who had to be quarantined. Having adequate staffing has been a challenge for us.

All of this has hit our center financially. We are not seeing the usual numbers of patients and some of our sites are closed. People are infected, exposed or have children who have nowhere to go when their siblings have an appointment, so families stay at home. We have to work around that.

The pediatricians in our group have been reaching out through phone calls to our community to encourage well child visits and provide accurate information about the pandemic. We let them know we are offering telehealth for families. They get follow-up calls after being tested to alert them about what to watch for and when they should contact us. We remind them about immunizations.

When families come in for well child visits, we let them know that if they or family members are having issues with COVID-19 we can offer behavioral health care. Many of them are very accepting and happy to hear that information.

I recently saw an 11-month-old breastfed girl who was delayed in getting her immunizations. We had not seen her since she was 5 months old. Her mom reported that she had never picked up the vitamin D that I prescribed, and on examination, I noted thickening of her wrists and nodularity of the costochondral junctions.

Lab work confirmed the diagnosis of vitamin D deficiency rickets.

Making sure she received the health care she needed is an excellent example of the importance of the work we do as pediatricians every day, especially in a time when fear and false information feeds our news outlets and parents struggle to find the truth.

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*The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the American Academy of Pediatrics.