Reach Out and Read

Ambulatory Care Network Community Programs

Overview

Reach Out and Read, a national hospital-based pre-literacy program that links reading aloud with giving books to children aged six months to five years during their primary health care visits was established in 1989 at Boston City Hospital. The program was initiated by the New York-Presbyterian Hospital Ambulatory Care Network, Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian and the Community Pediatrics of Columbia University in 1997, and is today one of the largest of 3,000 Reach Out and Read programs nationwide.

Providers of pediatric medicine know better than most that the developing brain is shaped by the stimulation of language, words, repetition and reading. Reading means healthy kids and a world of opportunity for them; and research tells us that being read to is the best medicine for a child's cognitive and language development. Reading aloud to children, indeed, is considered to be the single most important activity to promoting future school success and a lifelong enjoyment of literacy activities.

The program in operation is relatively straightforward. During pediatric primary care visits, the health care provider, a doctor or nurse practitioner, offers the child a gift of a specially selected book. The personal relationship that develops between the patient and the health care professional allows for books tailored to the child's individual needs and interests to be selected. This assures that the gift will have greater meaning for the child. In presenting the book, the doctor or nurse looks through it with the child, commenting to the parent or caretaker on the child's responses and makes a linkage to reading as related to the child's developmental stage and the multitude of values associated with reading.

Pivotal to the success of Reach Out and Read is the involvement of volunteers who read to children in the waiting rooms. Volunteers receive instruction and training in early childhood development, the elements of literacy, and strategies for interactive reading aloud. As they read aloud, volunteers simultaneously encourage children to identify pictures and add their own experiences. They provide children with an opportunity to re-tell a story by expressing their thoughts through art.

The role of the hospital in the delivery of modern health care extends beyond providing medical necessities such as immunizations and regular check-ups. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has sustained a long tradition of community care and has been especially innovative in improving community health through ancillary programs and complementary activities. Reach Out and Read offers the chance to provide our youngest citizens with skills and experiences they can use to succeed and build a good life. By promoting literacy hand-in-hand with health, Reach Out and Read helps to build strong citizens and healthier communities.

Mission

Reach Out and Read makes literacy promotion a standard part of pediatric primary care, so that children grow up with books and a love of reading.

Goals

By integrating early literacy into standard well-child pediatric visits, pediatricians promote the acquisition of verbal and written language skills in young children and increase the likelihood of eventual school success. Emergent literacy skills are the precursors of formal reading skills, which ultimately help children succeed in school. Children with strong reading skills are at a lower risk of suffering numerous negative outcomes connected to school failure – school truancy, dropping out of school, substance abuse, and teen pregnancy.

We train our Pediatricians yearly and track the consistency of their giving out of books and of advice. We currently are giving books out at 65% of Well Child Visits and hope to increase this to 85% by January 2009.

Outreach

Literacy Fair

For the past five years Reach Out and Read has held a Family Literacy Fair in an effort to reach out to the community. The goal of the Literacy Fair is to take advantage of the literacy focus of Children's Hospital of New York to host an event that provides children from the community an opportunity to expand their literacy horizons – enjoying great works of children's literature, meeting renown bilingual authors of those works and seeing themselves as authors.

We invite toddlers from local Early Childhood Head Start Programs from the Columbia School, in addition to First and Second Graders from local elementary schools to create personalized books at school during the weeks prior to the event. The children's books are collected and displayed in Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian's Winter Garden for peers and family members to see. In addition, patients from the pediatric ambulatory care practices will be invited to attend with parents to join in a day of literacy activities.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital's Ambulatory Care Network, Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian and the Community Pediatrics of Columbia University promotes the importance of reading aloud as the most important thing families can do to help their children love books and start school ready to learn. This event presents a wonderful opportunity for both parents and children to see the richness and fun found in children's literature. It is a day filled with reading and activities, which allows children and their families to experience the power of literacy and its affect on the healthy development of every child.

Accomplishments

The Reach Out and Read program at NewYork-Presbyterian was initiated in 1997; today it serves more than 10,000 children annually at the Ambulatory Care Network sites and distributes approximately 20,000 books annually. In nearly 10 years, our Reach Out and Read program has grown from a single site at the Washington Heights Family Health Center on 181st Street, to a full operation in five Ambulatory Care Network sites located in Washington Heights and Inwood.

Populations Served

The program serves children of the underserved population residing in Northern Manhattan and surrounding neighborhoods in the Bronx, including the Marble Hill area of Riverdale.