Committee on Hospital Care

The Mission of the Committee on Hospital Care is to collaborate with AAP members, pediatric specialists, families, national organizations and hospital providers to develop and disseminate standards, policies, guidelines and expert advice supporting the delivery of safe and effective patient and family-centered hospital care of children in conjunction with the patient’s medical home.

On June 25, 1930, two days after founding the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Executive Board met at the University Club in Detroit, MI. After other business, the Executive Board moved that the new President, Dr Isaac Abt, appoint several committees, one of which was the Committee on Hospitals and Dispensaries. The committee was appointed and soon started its work.

The committee delivered its first report at the 1931 annual meeting. At that time, it proposed to gather information on hospitals in the United States and recommend ways in which they could improve their care of children. The Committee has continued to function ever since. In 1955 it was renamed the Committee on Hospital Care (COHC). The Committee also works closely with the Section on Hospital Medicine (SOHM) on a number of projects and initiatives. 

The COHC continues to seek resources to help those involved with providing hospital care:

• Q&A
  The COHC reached out to the Chief Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for clarity on the visitiation rule.
  Question: Our hospital and department are currently wrestling with the new CMS rules of no visitation rule restrictions with the exception of certain clinical situations.  What are people doing about allowing open visitation of the entire neighbor into areas like the normal newborn nursery?
  Response: "The Medicare regulations on visitation allows for hospital policy to place limits on visitation when limits are clinically necessary and reasonable, for example, based on infection risks.  The intent of the policy was to prohibit incidents of hospitals denying visitation rights based on non-clinical reasons to persons, such as domestic partners, that patients wanted to have visitation rights."-Patrick Conway, MD,
  Other examples of reasons for limiting visiting based on clinical reasons in the preamble of the rule include: visitation may interfere with the care of other patients; the hospital is aware of an existing court order restricting contact; visitors are disruptive, threatening, or violent; the patient or the patient's roommate(s) need rest or privacy; protocols in a substance abuse treatment program; number of visitors at any given time; minimum age limit for child visitors.

• Coordinating the Medical Home with Hospitalist Care
  In 2012, a commentary written by Jerrold Eichner, MD, FAAP, and W Carl Cooley, MD, FAAP, for Hospital Pediatrics discusses the expectations and benefits of coordinating patient care between a medical home and hospitalist. A patient's medical home provider delivers and/or coordinates all primary, preventive, acute, and chronic care. The article indicates that hospitalization can be a stressful time for patients and their families and that information sharing between the hospitalist and medical home at hospital admission, during hospitalization and at discharge can ease the transition across care settings and prevent adverse patient effects.

View policy statements and reports from COHC

View current COHC members

Additional Committee Resources

• View the current In Brief eNewsletter, as well as past issues: November 2010 and October 2009

• Information on Standing Orders
• American Hospital Association (AHA)
  
• Child Life Council
  
• National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI)
  
• Society of Pediatric Nurses (SPN)
• The Joint Commission (TJC)
  

Past Committee Chairpersons