More doctors 'prescribing' books

The Baltimore Sun

A year ago, Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein challenged city pediatricians serving young, low-income patients to participate in Reach Out and Read, a national program that asks doctors to dole out books with shots and prescriptions.

About a third of the 72 pediatric practices were already participating, sending each child between the ages of 6 months to five years old away with a book after each checkup, a total of 37,000 books a year.

Yesterday, Sharfstein announced that 20 more practices have met his challenge, making Baltimore the city with the fastest program expansion rate in the country and putting 18,514 more books into circulation. Another four city practices -- meaning 4,640 more books -- are about to sign on.

Dr. Barry Zuckerman, the Reach Out and Read director and chief of pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, has marketed his program to individual practices since it began more than a decade ago. The program is at 32,000 sites.

But never has a city decided to use its power to persuade doctors to sign on.

"We're in all 50 states," Zuckerman said. "But Baltimore is the first one that said, "OK, if half the children are benefiting from this, we want to spread this so the other half can benefit, too."

The Baltimore Health Department is promoting the program with the Maryland Academy of Pediatrics by doing fundraising. Unlike doctors elsewhere, no Baltimore pediatricians are required to use their own money, though some have helped with fundraising. Each book costs about $2.75, meaning a doctor who gives away 620 books a year has a $1,705 book budget.

Sharfstein occasionally found recruiting difficult.

To get one doctor to sign on, the health commissioner designed an army-like book ambush, where he planned to show up at a doctor's office with a stack of children's books and a digital camera and announce with much fanfare that the doctor had won free books.

The first try was a dud -- Sharfstein showed up at the wrong office and found it vacant.

The second book attack, however, was a success, he said. The doctor was won over by a Norman Rockwell-like scene in her office -- one of her patients bent over a book -- and agreed to participate.

The program is particularly important in Baltimore, where more than 100,000 people live below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and books are not in the budget and reading may not be on a parent's to-do list.

"The parents who get free books and advice and encouragement on reading from their doctors are four or five times more likely to read to their children every day," Sharfstein said. "Children are much more likely to show up in school ready to learn, to have higher reading scores and to have higher developmental scores for language."

Preliminary results of a Maryland literacy study released yesterday show that 51 percent of Maryland children ages 5 and younger are read to daily. But the results for low-income children were lower -- with 40 percent of children whose parents earn less than twice the poverty-level standard read to daily.

The challenge is to expand the program across the state. While other Maryland doctors participate in the program, it has not caught on in the way it has in the city because no state agency has made Reach Out and Read its primary cause, as Sharfstein has done.

"That 50 percent is good," Zuckerman said. "They're being prepared for school. But what about the other 49 percent? They're the ones we have to reach."

julie.turkewitz@baltsun.com

Online

Read our education blog at baltimoresun.com/classroom

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad
72°