2006 Florida Children's Summit
Compilation of Commitment Issues
| Click here to see the Summit recommendations for this issue. |
Receive early and continuous (periodic) assessment of developmental, cognitive and emotional/behavioral progress and provide early intervention and treatment where indicated.
Early and periodic assessment is the key to intervention and treatment that can result in reduction or elimination of conditions and individual risk factors that can result in life-long chronic, debilitating and expensive physical and mental illness. When done appropriately, assessment is the basis for effective decisions with respect to intervention and treatment. By the same token, failure to act upon the results of an assessment or to only address some of the issues identified reduces the utility of the assessment and can result in partial solutions that may be of limited value or even make the situation worse. Our challenge is to build a child well-being system that provides early and periodic assessment for all children and the flexibility to intervene and treat identified problems in a holistic fashion-a system where the services and the dollars follow the child, not the provider or the program. In doing this, we must include all costs from potential poor outcomes when measuring the benefit to cost ratio.