KIDS Family Advocacy Project
at Barbara Bush Children's Hospital

The KIDS Family Advocacy Project (KIDS FAP) is a medical-legal collaboration between KIDS Legal Aid of Maine and the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center. Funded by a grant from the Maine Health Access Foundation, KIDS FAP started in the Summer of 2004.

Environmental and social stressors can have a negative impact on a child's health. Lawyers at KIDS LEGAL provide trainings, consultations and resource tools to medical providers at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital to help medical providers identify legal issues that have a negative impact on a child's health. Examples include unsafe housing leading to chronic illness or injury, denial of a welfare program affecting nutrition or stable housing, or the denial of special education services for a disabled child. The Resource Code Card was originally developed under the KIDS FAP as a screening tool for medical providers. When a legal issue is identified by a medical provider, a referral is then made to a KIDS attorney.

Attorneys from KIDS hold regular office hours at the ambulatory care clinic (pediatrics clinic) 3 days a week. Being on-site allows the lawyers to provide immediate consultations to medical providers as well as meet with patients needing legal advice and/or assistance immediately. When the attorney is off-site, a pager maintains the connection between the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital and KIDS Legal Aid of Maine.

KIDS FAP has a full time attorney and part-time intake worker from KIDS Legal Aid of Maine. The medical director, Dr. Christopher Stenberg, is housed at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital.

Through a grant by the Jessie B. Cox Charitable Trust, the KIDS FAP project is also part of a coalition of FAPs in New England to publish a white paper about medical-legal collaboration.

Read our Op-Ed piece about the Project.