Child Abuse Pediatrics: New Specialty, Renewed Mission

Pediatricians and children's hospitals have a long history of working together to improve children's health and well-being. Over the last half century, a focus of this work has concerned child maltreatment and family violence. As the scope of these problems has become clearer, it has created new challenges and opportunities for collaboration.1,2 These serious public health problems were highlighted recently by 2 important changes that will improve the provision of services to maltreated children and their families. The first change is the designation of board certification in child abuse pediatrics by the American Board of Pediatrics and the announcement in 2010 that 191 pediatricians achieved this recognition. The second change is the recent effort by the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI) to highlight and characterize the critical role of child abuse teams at children's hospitals. The NACHRI has proposed a framework to aid understanding of the range of services offered at children's hospitals and collected 2 sets of data for describing the services provided, making benchmarks available, and defining best practices.3,–,5 The partnership between child abuse pediatricians and children's hospitals is a natural one, because the nation's children's hospitals are increasingly asked to provide services to abused and neglected children both within their immediate communities and as referral centers within their geographic regions. Child maltreatment continues to be a major problem in the United States. In this commentary we highlight current understanding of the problem and focus on the vision of how this new subspecialty, working in collaboration with children's hospitals, can have a positive impact on the children and families they both serve. Most pediatricians think that there is not much good news related to a problem as onerous as child maltreatment, but here we highlight 3 … Address correspondence to Angelo P. Giardino, MD, PhD, MPH, Baylor College of Medicine, 2450 Holcombe, Suite 34L, Houston, TX 77021. E-mail: apgiardi{at}texaschildrens.org