Article: Addressing energy insecurity with medical-legal partnership
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Energy insecurity may result in adverse consequences for children’s health, particularly for children with special health needs or chronic health conditions. Working within a medical-legal partnership, an urban hospital-based pediatric practice standardized criteria for providers approving medical need utility certification requests. Authors compared prior-year utility certification requests and approvals (pre-intervention) with the intervention year for families who reported energy insecurity on a waiting-room screening questionnaire. Between the first and second years of the study, certification of medical need approvals increased by 65 percent, preventing utility shut-offs for 396 more families with vulnerable children.