Delivering healthcare services to children with cerebral palsy and their families

Children with cerebral palsy have complex healthcare needs and often require complex multidisciplinary care. It is important for clinicians to understand which approaches to healthcare service delivery for this population are supported in the literature and how these should be applied in clinical practice.

Current approaches to healthcare service delivery for children with cerebral palsy in the literature are family-centred care, collaborative community-based primary care and the World Health Organisation’s ICF. However, healthcare services for children with cerebral palsy and their families are not always delivered according to these approaches, and currently available guidelines or standards of care for children with cerebral palsy do not reflect these approaches. Future research is required to investigate how the different approaches to healthcare service delivery can be integrated into clinical practice to enable better delivery of healthcare services according to the principles of these approaches.

In addition, guidelines or standards of care need to reflect not only what services to pro- vide to children with cerebral palsy and their families, but importantly, how these services should be delivered. Improved delivery of healthcare services according to the current approaches to care, and the development of guidelines or standards of care in collaboration with children with cerebral palsy and their parents that reflects the current approaches, may contribute to improved healthcare experiences and, therefore, satisfaction with care within this population.

Delivering healthcare services to children with cerebral palsy and their families: a narrative review, Hayles E, Jones A, Harvey D, Plummer D, Ruston S. Health Soc Care Community. 2015 May;23(3):242-51. doi: 10.1111/hsc.12121. Epub 2014 Sep 1.