Local level solutions for reducing transportation barriers to health care access

Lack of access to reliable transportation is an underreported but pervasive barrier to healthcare access for poor and low-income children in the US. The Children's Health Fund's (CHF) Child Health Transportation Initiative (CHTI) is a response to this challenge. The CHTI is a four-year program of research, advocacy and grant support to transportation-disadvantaged communities.

A key focus of the CHTI is support of community-based transportation solutions that can lead to better access to healthcare for children and their parents. Pilot healthcare transportation projects have been established in six sites in Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana. Local circumstances and locally-developed solutions differ across the pilot sites. CHF provides technical assistance to each pilot project and will support external evaluations of each site during the course of the Initiative. Earlier presentations have described the models used and anticipated outcomes for the projects. In this presentation, we will provide an update on progress to date, and discuss key lessons learned, over the course of project implementation across all six sites.

Through the pilot projects, CHF seeks to demonstrate that improved access to adequate transportation for non-emergency child health conditions can result in fewer missed child healthcare appointments and lower levels of emergency room use for non-emergency conditions. We will discuss lessons learned at the community level that may serve as useful inputs for transportation-disadvantaged communities seeking to improve healthcare access through better coordination of existing transportation resources and via improved communication and collaboration between healthcare providers and the transportation sector.