Pediatric advocacy: Advancement in academic institutions.

IMPACT: Children are facing many threats to their health today that require system change at a sweeping level to have real-world impact. Pediatricians are positioned as natural leaders to advocate for these critical community and policy changes. Academic medical center (AMC) leaders recognize the importance of this advocacy and clear steps can be taken to improve the structure to support pediatricians in their advocacy careers through faculty development and promotion, including standardized scholarly measurement of the outcomes.

Community Engagement: How to Form Authentic Partnerships for Lasting Change.

Pediatricians play a critical role in promoting child health through community engagement, yet the skills required to be effective leaders and advocates alongside the community are often not the focus of traditional medical training. The American Academy of Pediatrics Community Pediatrics Training Initiative provides faculty and resident training, curricula, and collaboratives to teach the core skills needed for upstream interventions that can affect the entire population of a community. Core skills include community assessment and competence, composed of data, observational, and experiential components. The work of community action begins to effect system-level change for sustainable, impactful improvements in child health.

Academic Careers in Advocacy: Aligning Institutional Values Through Use of an Advocacy Portfolio.

Academic children's hospitals must embrace advocacy as a central component of their missions to discover new knowledge and improve the health of the communities and patients they serve. To do so, they must ensure faculty have both the tools and the opportunities to develop and articulate the work of advocacy as an academic endeavor. This can be accomplished by integrating the work of advocacy at the community and policy-change levels into the traditional value systems of academic medicine, especially the promotions process, to establish its legitimacy. Academic pediatric institutions can support this transformation through robust training and professional development programs and establishing opportunities, resources, and leadership positions in advocacy. The adoption of an advocacy portfolio can be used to align these activities and accomplishments to institutional values and promotion. This alignment is crucial to supporting the advocacy work of pediatricians at a time in which community engagement and systems and policy change must be added to professional activities to ensure optimal outcomes for all children.