Preventative Medical Care for Pediatric Asthma and Utilization of Mental Health Care Services

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine a gap in the literature pertaining to preventive medical care for children with asthma, and the bridge this may provide in accessing mental health care services. Generalized ordinal logistic regression (GOLR) was used to examine the association between preventative medical visits and conditional probability of emergency room (ER) visits, to examine whether problem(s) obtaining mental health care services moderated the association between preventative medical visits and ER visits, and to examine the conditional probability of ER visits, given the presence of an ongoing mental health or behavioral concern for the child. Secondly, ordinal logistic regression (OLR) was used to examine the association between preventive medical visits and mental health care access barriers. GOLR results indicated more preventive medical visits are associated with a higher number of ER visits, in contrast to the initial hypothesis. Additionally, results suggest the presence of problems accessing mental health care services impacts the relationship between preventive medical visits and ER visits. Further, GOLR results indicated children identified as having an ongoing mental health concern by the caregiver are more likely to have at least one ER visit than those who were not reported to have an ongoing mental health concern, and this outcome was statistically significant. OLR results suggest a statistically significant relationship between preventive medical care and received mental health care services, indicating that more preventive visits are associated with an increased number of mental health care services. Study limitations, implications and directions for future research are discussed.