Welcome to Children’s Health Care,

Your Patient-Centered Medical Home

Children’s Health Care’s mission is to provide the best and most comprehensive pediatric and adolescent medical care in our service area. We practice medicine as a team and value the contributions of all of our staff in providing excellent medical care and service. As a medical home for our families, we emphasize our children’s health and well-being as our primary responsibility. It is our goal to help parents assist their children to grow up in a healthy environment so that they may achieve their greatest potential.

About Children’s HealthCare

Since 1972, Children’s HealthCare has provided quality, caring pediatric and adolescent care to families throughout the Merrimack Valley and seacoast regions of Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. As pediatricians, our focus is on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of conditions that primarily affect children and adolescents from birth through 21 years of age.

From the healthiest newborn to the child with complex medical or special care needs, our dedicated staff work together to provide coordinated care for our patients in all areas–medical, behavioral, developmental, and nutritional. Because we understand that families need flexibility, we offer extensive office hours, including evening hours for checkups and sick visits as well as urgent care on weekends and holidays.

Since 1972, Children’s Health Care has provided outstanding medical care to children throughout the Merrimack Valley and seacoast regions of Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Children’s Health Care offers a full range of pediatric and adolescent care, including newborn care, well-child care, emergency care, treatment of common (and uncommon) illnesses, and adolescent care through age 21.

We also provide special consultative services for a wide array of medical, behavioral, developmental, and nutritional problems. A special care coordinator is available to help families of children with complex or out-of-the-ordinary medical issues coordinate their primary and specialty care. She is also available to assist with special education issues. Additionally we offer on site consultation with a registered nutritionist.

My role at CHC is to aid the families of our children* with special or complex health care needs. Although I have a nursing background, my qualifications for this position come largely from my own life experiences parenting a child with special care needs for the past twenty five years.

I have extensive knowledge of the services and benefits available to our families. I am also available for consultations to assist with special education issues and help families understand the often overwhelming 504 and Individualized Education Plan (IEP) processes.

I am available in our Newburyport office/Upper Level, Monday through Thursday at (978) 388-7250 (fax #978-462-2922) or I can be reached by e-mail @ b.kneeland@chcmass.com

*My services are available exclusively to the patients and families of Children’s Health Care of Newburyport and Haverhill, Massachusetts.

CHC is striving to become a Medical Home.

So what is a Medical Home?

For years parents of children with serious, chronic, complex health care problems have been struggling with the problems that parents of healthy children do not face. Because these children often require multiple services, they spend a lot of time in different offices and clinics. The Academy of Pediatrics has developed the concept of the Medical Home: services provided by the pediatricians practice that are responsive to the special needs of these children and their families.

A medical home is NOT a building, house, or hospital. Children and their families who have a medical home receive the care they need from a pediatrician whom they know and trust. Pediatric health care professionals and parents act as partners in a medical home to identify and access all of the medical and non medical services needed to help children and their families achieve their maximum potential.

All care in a medical home is family centered. This means that the medical home recognizes that the family is essential to the child’s care. Your pediatrician works to help families and other professionals work together better. It is important for your pediatrician to consider all the needs of the child and family- medical, emotional, educational, and more.

In a medical home a care coordinator will act as a liaison between the primary care doctors and specialists, and find new ways to meet the child and families needs- in the doctors office and in the community.