The vision of the Center for the Urban Child and Healthy Family at Boston Medical Center is that all children have an equal opportunity: to be healthy; to be ready to learn; and to achieve their full potential. The Center will achieve health equity by building the Pediatric Practice of the Future. Building the Pediatric Practice of the Future will require fundamental systems change—creating and scaling novel health delivery approaches, and working with families, inter-disciplinary colleagues, communities and other family-serving sectors.
As a first step, the Center spent the summer and early fall conducting a comprehensive landscape analysis, including understanding the families BMC Pediatric Primary Care serves. In order to do this, the Center undertook mapping BMC pediatric primary care families by zip code and other important factors such as age and primary language spoken.
Geographical mapping allows deeper understanding of the neighborhoods in which BMC families are living. This information can then be leveraged to think about challenges and opportunities in these neighborhoods. It also facilitates identifying meaningful, accessible community partnerships to develop relationships over time in order to better meet the needs of families.
The Center team used software to map the zip codes of the primary addresses of 12,194 children who attended BMC pediatrics primary care at least once between January 2017 and June 2018. Most of the families served live in Suffolk, Middlesex or Norfolk counties. However, BMC Primary Care Pediatrics serves families living as far away as Hampden County (Figure 1). Based on this mapping, it appears that many of families with a child between 0 and five years old live in the southern part of Dorchester (Figure 2).
To read the full mapping report and to view additional maps click here.