The family health maintenance demonstration : a controlled long term investigation of family health. Proceedings of a round table at the 1953 Annual Conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund.

  • Milbank Memorial Fund.
Date:
1954
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The family health maintenance demonstration : a controlled long term investigation of family health. Proceedings of a round table at the 1953 Annual Conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    This investigation was initiated by the Health Committee of the Community Service Society. It involves a group of families receiv ing medical care from the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, known as HIP. A medical practice group from the staff of Montefiore Hospital was chosen to carry on the field work. The governing board consists of representatives of the Community Serv ice Society, Montefiore Hospital, Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Full information concerning the Demonstration will be found in the pages of this report. Suffice it to point out here that the team of workers consists of an internist, a pediatrician, a psychiatric social worker and a public health nurse. The specialized skills of this health team are brought to bear on the families with the aim of promoting a high level of physical, social, and emotional health. The working team is aided by a group of consultants consisting of a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a social scientist, and a specialist in health education. It is not surprising that the Family Health Demonstration has be come an educational process both for the families involved, the working team and the consultants. Whether its benefits can be ex tended to medical students and recent graduates without interfer ence with its progress, is now under consideration. In many ways the Demonstration is breaking new ground and encountering the difficulties and obstacles which are the usual ac companiments of this kind of pioneering. How to deal with the control group of families is a problem which has not been fully solved. A number of valuable suggestions on this point were made during the conference and will be found in the proceedings which follow. The measurement of family health is of course the key to the success of the undertaking. While competent biostatisticians have been at the service of the Demonstration from the beginning, the workers concerned have come to realize that they need the ad vice of a statistician qualified in medical statistics on a day to day basis, so that the data collected will bear directly on the problems they are attempting to solve. While the growing interest and enthusiasm among all the par