Large numbers of children in the United States did not receive basic clinical preventive care before 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Almost a quarter of children aged 3-17 years who made clinic visits in 2009-2010 had no record of blood pressure measurement. In 2011, 47% of adolescent females had not received their first HPV vaccination. Only about 21% of parents with children aged 10-47 months reported completing a developmental screen in 2007, and 20% of adolescent smokers received advice on stopping tobacco use in 2004-2010. More than half of children reported not visiting the dentist in the past year in 2009, and only 14% of children received dental preventive measures in that time, the CDC said.
"Parents need to know that many clinical preventive services for their children, such as screening and vaccination, are available for free with many health plans," Dr. Lorraine Yeung, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, said in the CDC statement.
The supplement to this week’s MMWR provides a baseline for care before implementation of the Affordable Care Act and is the second in a series of reports meant to measure the progress in increasing the use of preventive care (MMWR 2014 Sept. 10;63[suppl. 2]:1-107).
