It’s around seven in the morning. Dr. Ronald Lindsay, Sherry Rosensweig, and a group of clinical psychologists, speech pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, and trainees pile into a fifteen-passenger van.
“I sometimes joke that my primary role is as the chauffeur,” said Lindsay, the team’s developmental pediatrician.
The Developmental Clinic Initiative, established in 1995 by the Ohio State University Nisonger Center, offers free services to families all across the state.
Their destination varies from week to week. Last Tuesday, it was a church’s small Sunday school room in Logan County. Next week it might be Athens County, Hocking County, or another southeastern Appalachian county. There they meet with up to six children under the age of 6 with developmental problems ranging from difficulty with language to autism.
Accompanied by their parents, relatives, and friends, these children are evaluated with a series of tests and assessments.
“If you ask a child to stack the blocks and they do, you know that they followed a command, which is language.” Lindsay said. “And they will do the fine motor skills to actually get those blocks one on top of the other. We’ll spend far less time on that child, so that we don’t overtax the child or the mom.”
Each child spends about an hour with each discipline.
“They try to always have pediatrics last because they are afraid I’m going to make the kids cry if I look in their ears,” Lindsay said.
“It’s a very unique project, going out to the Appalachian area, serving a population that is undeserved,” said Rosensweig, the clinic’s Program Manager.
Local public health nurses aid provide help as well. They gather the background information on the child and send it to the Nisonger Center for evaluation.
“It’s so much easier for the kids to see all the specialist on the same day,” said Kelly Taulbee, a Registered Nurse from Hocking County.
The Ambulatory Pediatric Association tends to agree with these accolades. They will award the Nisonger Center and its Developmental Clinic Initiative with its 2003 APA Health Care Delivery Award.
The award consists of a plaque and $500, and will be presented at the annual meeting in Seattle on May 4, said APA Executive Director Marge Degnon.
The award is given annually and recognizes an innovative and effective program that provides health care in the context of teaching.
The clinic won honorable mention the year before.
“It was a pretty close competition, because the organization had never awarded an honorable mention before,” Lindsay said. “If I had maybe done a little bit better job with my own writing skills, we would have won it outright the first go around. But you learn.”
Not only does the clinic provide free services to rural communities, it trains students from various universities as well.
“They utilize the rural clinics that are in Logan and Hocking County for their clinical training,” Lindsay said. “For their lectures and seminars, we have Internet based video conferencing capability. When we do a lecture, they just have to dial-up and ask questions in real-time.”
“The need for the Developmental Clinic is huge, it fills up six months in advance. They visit us six times a year, I wish it was more,” said Taulbee.
