What should doctors do at well-child visits?

As a family physician who provides care to children, and as a father of four ranging in age from 7 months to 8 years, I have a professional and personal interest in the content of well-child visits beyond childhood immunizations. Not only can health maintenance and counseling vary from practice to practice, previous reviews have found large gaps in the evidence to support preventive services recommended by government health agencies and medical groups. Also, clinicians who compare the Bright Futures / American Academy of Pediatrics "Recommendations for Preventive Pediatric Health Care" to the clinical recommendations for children published by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) will find that groups sometimes disagree about which services should be offered at well-child visits.

To provide perspective on how the AAFP evaluates evidence regarding the net benefit of individual preventive services in children, I recently wrote an editorial in American Family Physician that reviewed the guideline process and discussed why there is insufficient evidence to recommend screening children for autism spectrum disorders, high blood pressure, and cholesterol levels. (Note to readers: although I am a member of the Commission on the Health of the Public and Science and verified that this editorial reflects current AAFP recommendations, it should not be considered an official statement of the AAFP.) Here is the bottom line:

Time is a precious clinical resource. Clinicians who spend time delivering unproven or ineffective interventions at health maintenance visits risk “crowding out” effective services. For example, a national survey of family and internal medicine physicians regarding adult well-male examination practices found that physicians spent an average of five minutes discussing prostate-specific antigen screening, but one minute or less each on nutrition and smoking cessation counseling. Similarly, family physicians have limited time at well-child visits and therefore should prioritize preventive services that have strong evidence of net benefit.

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This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.