Development of health care for children - a literature review

The children's health care system is significantly weaker because it is constrained by outdated conventions, inadequate resources, and outdated incentive structures inherent in the traditional medical model that still dominates pediatric care. These structural barriers, organizational challenges, and financial constraints limit the system's ability to adequately recognize, respond to, and, most importantly, prevent adverse developmental outcomes at the population level. New imperatives to improve population health, along with growing recognition among policymakers and practitioners of the social and developmental determinants of health, have led to recent innovations in care models, service coordination, and coverage design. Yet available resources and infrastructure are static or shrinking, displaced by rising overall health care costs and other policy priorities. Child health systems are at a crossroads of conflicting priorities and incentives, and there is a need to explore how the health system can successfully break out of this impasse. The purpose of this publication is to provide a brief review of the literature on the development of health care for children.