Funding will allow the Child Abuse Response Team at the UNM Health Sciences Center to bring in staff dedicated to supporting the center and expand clinical services to better reach areas outlying the metro area, said Dr. Leslie Strickler, medical director for the Child Abuse Response Team and associate professor of pediatrics at UNM Children’s Hospital.
“Our goal is to improve clinical care, education, advocacy and collaboration between all stakeholders and incorporate primary, secondary and tertiary prevention initiatives,” Strickler said.
Funding will allow CART to better recognize risk for abuse, occurrence of abuse and ultimately decrease the prevalence of abuse in New Mexico, she said.
As compared to other states in the United States, New Mexico sees higher rates of abuse per capita and a greater number of deaths due to child abuse, Strickler said.
While New Mexico’s ranking rose slightly from 50th in 2013 to 49th in 2014 in the national KIDS COUNT rankings of child wellbeing, state policymakers have not managed to make much progress toward improving how the state cares for its kids, according to a press release by New Mexico Voices for Children, a nonpartisan, statewide advocacy organization founded in 1987 by a group of pediatricians.
The KIDS COUNT program measures 16 indicators of child wellbeing, and New Mexico saw improvement in just five of those, the statement said.
“Worse, child poverty — a main factor in poor outcomes — actually increased (from 28 percent to 31 percent) even as it decreased in most of the rest of the nation,” the press release stated.
The annual state KIDS COUNT report stressed that state lawmakers should make a priority of addressing the needs of all children by supporting a holistic, coordinated and two-generation approach that serves both children and their families.
“We recognize that the data change over one year does not provide a trend, but it is still concerning that some of our worst child wellbeing outcomes continue to decline,” said Veronica C. García, executive director of NM Voices.
CART typically evaluates only 20 to 30 children a month, about half of whom ultimately are determined to be victims of abuse, Strickler said.
“Although we see fewer patients than many other doctors, we spend a great deal of time with our patients — a minimum of 1 hour, and sometimes much more — and generate lengthy consultative reports and care coordination,” Strickler said.
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The scarcity of pediatricians who are board-certified in child abuse pediatrics worsens the issue.
New Mexico has four child abuse specialists, and CART would like to add a fifth in the next one to two years, she said.
“This level of staffing is barely sufficient to mange the workload in the Albuquerque metropolitan area,” Strickler said. “Specialized resources are much scarcer in the rural and frontier areas of the state.”
Strickler said she and her team face many challenges in dealing with the child abuse cases and in their efforts to eradicate this tragedy from society.
“From a clinical perspective, it’s lack of adequate education for health care providers in recognizing abuse, and too few providers with specialized experience in the field,” she said. “Form a community perspective, lack of education and awareness of abuse, and lack of public outcry and intervention for children at risk are major challenges.”
Citizens and state government need to be more concerned about what is happening to their kids, and better support families in nurturing healthy children, she said.
“We need to address the other public health crises that increase risk for child maltreatment. These include poverty, domestic violence, mental health problems and substance abuse,” Strickler said.
She considers “denialism” another major barricade in the way of eradicating child abuse from the society, she said.
“We can’t fix things that we don’t properly acknowledge,” she said.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah
