HealthCity: Prof. Sprague Martinez on Why Health Systems Need Youth Participation

In Boston Medical Center’s HealthCity, BUSSW associate professor Linda Sprague Martinez and Dr. Katherine Gergen Barnett explain how young people can improve our health care systems.

Excerpted from “Youth Engagement in Healthcare Systems and Delivery Methods” by Ilima Loomis:

As a physician practicing family medicine, Katherine Gergen Barnett, MD, has seen many young patients brought in by their parents for checkups and preventative care through childhood and early adolescence, only to stop coming for appointments when they hit the high school and college years.

“What the literature shows us is that there’s a big drop-off in engagement,” she says. “I’m very curious about that: What are the barriers to engagement, and what are we doing as a system to enable them?”

While examining and boosting youth participation in care delivery systems can be challenging, she says, it may lead to greater health equity, better quality of care, and improved outcomes for accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other providers, ultimately reducing short- and long-term costs.

A study led by Sprague Martinez offers insight:

An understanding of the top health concerns of young people and the hurdles to their seeking care is among the benefits of engaging teens and young adults in research, healthcare policy, and care transformation, says Gergen Barnett, who coauthored a recent study on youth engagement in Health Affairs. She serves as vice chair of primary care innovation and transformation and program director of family medicine at Boston Medical Center.

In the study, researchers recruited 12 local Black and Latinx youth ages 13 to 18 and hired a young adult facilitator to lead a community health assessment. Participants designed and conducted a community survey to understand their health concerns.

“They conducted a health assessment with their peers and other people in their community, and they were able to reach people we might not have otherwise heard from,” says Linda Sprague Martinez, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor and department chair of macro practice at the Boston University School of Social Work.

Youth ultimately identified mental and sexual health, food access, and community safety as the community’s top health concerns, and developed recommendations for improving health and addressing inequities.

To put it simply:

“You can have all the services in the world, but if young people don’t know about them it’s not going to be helpful,” Sprague Martinez says.

It just makes sense that understanding the needs of young people and designing healthcare systems with them in mind can increase their participation and use of services, Sprague Martinez says: “If someone’s throwing a party for you, you would want to have a say in what kind of party it is and what would make you want to attend. In healthcare, we don’t ask them what kind of program they might want or need, but we still expect them to come and engage in what we’re offering.”

Read the full article here. Published by HealthCity on November 13, 2020.