Achieving Better Health Care Outcomes for Children in Foster Care

This article reviews the challenges health care systems face as they attempt to improve health care outcomes for children in foster care. It discusses several of the promising health care strategies occurring outside the perimeter of child welfare and identifies some of the key impasses in working alongside efforts in child welfare reform. The authors posit that the greatest impasse in establishing a reasonable quality of health care for these children is placement instability, in which children move frequently among multiple homes and in and out of the child welfare system. The authors propose potential strategies in which efforts to improve placement stability can serve as a vehicle for multidisciplinary reform across the health care system.