As a loving parent, your foremost desire is to see your child live a happy, healthy, and productive life. Here at FamilyCare of Kent, we will team up with you to bring that to fruition. We have built a solid reputation for our expertise, compassion, and profound dedication to consistently providing high-quality, holistic care, which we believe helps lay the groundwork for the children in Kent and beyond to thrive in all aspects of their health.
Our practice is run by highly credentialed family nurse practitioners whose commitment transcends providing prompt and effective treatment for common childhood illnesses and injuries. We offer comprehensive preventive healthcare services, through which we promote and safeguard the health and well-being of the youngest members of our community. Through patient education, we guide, support, and empower our pediatric patients and their families to make the wisest decisions about their health.
Let’s take a closer look at just a few of the children’s preventative healthcare services we offer here at FamilyCare of Kent.
Well-Child Visits
Well-child visits are a time when we conduct physical exams and health screenings to identify potential health problems and work on mitigating them while they’re still highly treatable. Well-child visits also allow us to monitor your child’s growth and development and make the necessary recommendations to help ensure they’re on track.
We follow the comprehensive health guidelines established by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for well-child care known as the periodicity schedule. The AAP’s periodicity schedule delineates the assessment and screenings pediatric patients should receive at each of their well-child visits from birth through age 21.
Whether you’re a nursing mother or a parent raising a toddler, we encourage you to see us for well-child visits according to the AAP’s recommended schedule, as outlined below:
- Three to five days after birth
- 1 month
- 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months
- 2, 2 ½, and 3 years
- After 3 years of age, your child should see us annually until they reach the age of 21.
Vaccinations
We strictly adhere to the recommended childhood immunization schedule developed by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We strongly encourage you to have your child receive all the vaccines recommended for their specific age group to protect them from potentially life-threatening, communicable diseases, such as rotavirus infection, diphtheria, pneumococcal disease, influenza, among many others.
If you are leery of vaccines and have either delayed or skipped routine child immunizations altogether, we will be happy to educate you about their safety, efficacy, and life-saving benefits.
We also provide catch-up vaccinations, which we administer to children who have not been previously vaccinated, who have missed their vaccine dose, or who have not completed a series.
Teen Sexual and Mental Health Promotion and Prevention
If you have an adolescent child, we highly recommend that you have them see us for sexual health counseling, confidential STD testing, and HPV vaccination.
Through sexual health counseling, we get to teach adolescents not only the basics of puberty and development but, more importantly, instill in them the importance of avoiding unwanted or risky sexual activity and help them understand the risks thereof.
As proponents of holistic care, we believe that mental health is an integral component of health care. Our nurse practitioners are highly trained and adept at creating opportunities to engage teens in meaningful conversations, enabling them to freely express their emotional concerns or talk openly about any other thing that concerns them.
We use Rapid Assessment for Adolescent Preventive Services (RAAPS), a technology-based adolescent-risk screening tool designed to get teens to talk about the things that they find hard to discuss in person or in writing. RAAPS is designed to identify and address risky behaviors as early as possible—before they affect the health, well-being, and academic performance of the teen.
To arrange an appointment with one of our family nurse practitioners, call us today at (253) 859-2273 (CARE), or simply fill out this form, and expect a call from us to schedule your visit.