Hard-to-reach families in a comprehensive care program

Providing primary paediatric careFrom the Family Health Care Program, Harvard Medical School and the Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts. The Family Health Care Program has been supported by grants from the Commonwealth Fund, United States Children's Bureau, Family Health Foundation, National Center for Health Services Research and Development, and the Theodore Schulze Foundation.This paper was presented as a special lecture at the Hospital for Sick Children, London, England on March

“…Most of the families who were lost in the recruiting period did not appear strikingly different from those who remained in the study. These lost families became part of a separate study that attempted to measure characteristics of families that fail to respond to an offer of medical care or, in the case of the control families, to participate in a health survey (White, Alpert & Kosa, 1967). Loss over the next 3 years averaged 7%4 a year and was similarly distributed in the experimental and control groups.…”