Addressing Unmet Social Needs Among Hospitalized Children

Millions of children in the US live in families with unmet social needs, and numbers increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Children with unmet social needs are at increased risk of experiencing worse health and health care outcomes, and addressing unmet social needs can improve health and reduce health care utilization. Consequently, many professional organizations now endorse screening for and addressing social needs in clinical settings. However, despite social needs screening recommendations, there are no established best practices for clinical settings, and there has not been much focus on the pediatric inpatient setting. In order to understand whether identifying and addressing social needs in the pediatric inpatient setting positively impacts social and health outcomes, interventions must be developed and assessed that seek to accomplish this. Before launching large trials to assess such interventions, the feasibility and acceptability of implementing social needs interventions in the pediatric inpatient setting must determined. The objective of this pilot study is to determine the feasibility and acceptability of implementing a social needs screening and intervention protocol in the pediatric inpatient setting by conducting a pilot trial on a pediatric ward. The investigators' hypothesis is that it will be feasible and acceptable to implement a social needs screening and intervention protocol in this setting.

The investigators will utilize a before-and-after trial design to assess feasibility, acceptability, process, and preliminary outcome measures of implementing a social needs screening and intervention protocol in a tertiary children's hospital. Caregivers of hospitalized pediatric patients will be eligible to participate in surveys about screening acceptability and social and health outcomes if they are over 18 and their child is hospitalized on the transitional care general pediatrics unit within the 4 months prior to implementation of the protocol (control/pre-implementation group) or 4 months after the wash-in period (intervention/post-implementation group). Nurses, social workers, case managers, nurse practitioners, and physicians will be eligible to participate in a survey about protocol acceptability and satisfaction if they worked on the unit after protocol implementation.

A study team member will approach caregivers and ask if they would be potentially interested in filling out a survey about their experiences with being screened for social needs during their hospitalization and being contacted in 90 days for a follow-up survey. If interested, a study team member will screen the caregiver for eligibility and then obtain caregiver informed consent before administering the baseline survey. The consent will include a HIPAA authorization form to enable access to EHR records for the purposes of extracting utilization data (e.g., missed follow-up appointments). A follow-up survey will be administered via phone 3 months later. For care team members, an email will be sent to unit staff requesting participation in a voluntary survey regarding the social needs protocol with a link to the consent and survey included.

The investigators' goal is to recruit 25 caregivers in both the pre- and post-period, for a total of 50 caregivers. For the care team member survey, the hope is to gain as many members' input as possible. Based on the employee engagement response at the study site, the investigators believe that emailing roughly 93 care team members will respond.

The investigators will develop a social needs screening and intervention protocol for the ward based on: 1) input from unit leaders and stakeholders; 2) interviews from caregivers and care team members conducted previously. The goal is to develop and implement the protocol with a multidisciplinary group of unit stakeholders in 6 months.