Positive Parental Enabling Factors and Child Healthcare Utilization

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ABSTRACT Multiple parental characteristics can serve as enabling factors for child healthcare utilization. Despite known links between parental mental health and parental stress with ineffective child healthcare utilization (greater emergency department [ED] use and less preventive care use), few studies have examined other related positive parental enabling factors that may be associated with more effective child healthcare utilization. Factors such as parent emotional and social support and parenting self-efficacy may help buffer parents from the stressors related to parenting an infant, and promote better parent emotional health. The association of these positive parental enabling factors with child healthcare utilization are not well understood or documented in a general population of children. The baseline data collected for the parent R01 (HD088586), a cluster RCT of the Parent-focused Redesign for Encounters, Newborns to Toddlers (PARENT) intervention, will allow me to contribute important findings to our knowledge of how parent characteristics are associated with child healthcare utilization. We will be able to assess utilization of ED, urgent care, and preventive care using objective data from chart review at the primary care clinics and local EDs, as well as parent reported, validated measures of parenting self-efficacy and parental emotional support. In this proposed diversity supplement, I will use data collected at baseline for the parent study to examine healthcare utilization (well-child care, urgent care, and ED) among enrolled participants and its association with parental emotional support and parenting self-efficacy. I hypothesize that higher levels of parent emotional support and parenting self-efficacy will be associated with decreased ED and urgent care utilization, and greater well-child care utilization.