Using Your Passion for Community Advocacy

Why advocacy?

Advocacy is largely driven by passion related to solving a specific problem or working to ensure the voice of a specific population is heard. Through this activity, you will learn the basic process for working to effect change in a community. However, true passion related to a given field, advocacy issue or population cannot be forced... it must come from within.

What is advocacy?

There are several definitions but here is one that highlights specifically the role of the pediatrician: 

Action by a physician to promote those social, economic, educational and political changes that ameliorate the suffering and threats to human health and well-being that he or she identifies through his or her professional work and expertise.

Advocacy is about using your lived experience in patient care to find your passion and use your skills to effect change. 

Why now?  

Pediatricians need to be ‘superheroes’ and follow their passion to do the hard work. Affecting social drivers of health, ensuring equitable health care access, combating misinformation and more are necessary actions to improve child health.  

“We see some things every day, all day, all week, all month, as the ultimate witnesses to failed social policy,” Dr. Hoffman said. “There comes a time when enough is enough, and we get spurred into action. The burden of this constant bearing witness activates that latent advocacy gene, combining with our love for kids and our experience and expertise, releasing the true hero within all of us.”

Layers of Advocacy

Individual

Pediatricians must demonstrate skills that result in effective care of children and families from all cultural backgrounds and diverse communities. This effective care includes the understanding of biases, risks for defined special populations, the connection to available community resources, and needed care coordination for improved patient outcomes.

Community

Pediatricians must engage communities to advocate for the well-being of children and families and act as child health consultants within those communities. They must work with community members, multidisciplinary teams, educators, and leaders from community organizations through authentic partnerships. They must be able to utilize their skills as advocates to address healthcare inequities and disparities in the communities they serve.

Structural

This layer of advocacy focuses on population level disparities and the structural inequities that permeate many aspects of life.  

Understanding these structural inequities can help pediatricians advocate for changes at this population level in their clinic or hospital setting, in their communities,or within a broader state or federal structure.  

This roadmap will highlight structural components within communities where pediatricians can take action for change. 

Policy

Pediatricians must have a foundational knowledge of local, municipal, state and federal policy processes and how these affect children. They must be aware of how laws, policies and regulations affect child health and how these may be influenced or changed to better child health. With this framework of knowledge, pediatricians can influence policy to reduce and eliminate structural and societal inequities to improve health for all children.  

Please see the AAP Advocacy Guide (AAP login required) for a deep dive into state and federal advocacy and government.  

Focus on Community

Why a separate roadmap for community advocacy? 

• It is not always intuitive to understand how a pediatrician can work alongside community members and organizations
• Identifies what the pediatrician brings to the partnership.
• Explains how pediatricians can get to know community members and organizations to make sure they are doing things WITH their community and not TO or FOR their community. 
• Community advocacy leads to sustainable change and takes a specific set of skills. 
• What can this look like?  Here are two examples:
  • Pediatrician partnering with their local school district to bring summer programming to students that includes not only fun learning activities but also a summer feeding program that includes food pick up for parents and siblings as well as daily breakfast and lunch for students.  Also includes health education topics for the summer led by clinic staff and resources for families to connect to needed services such as health insurance, WIC and SNAP with onsite support. 
  • Pediatrician partnering with a homeless youth drop-in center to provide care to teens at the center.  Includes onsite free clinic and health education topics based on monthly teen feedback.