While Children's Medical Services (CMS) has the responsibility for organizing the quality of services for children with special health care needs in Florida, not all children in publicly supported insurance programs are insured through Children's Medical Services. To ensure quality of services for all CSHCN, it will be important to ensure appropriate specialists are accessible within each of the insurance programs.

Figure 26: Percent of Florida CSHCN by Insurance Program as Reported by Parents, State Fiscal Year 2000-2001 Source: Shenkman and Bono (2002) Florida KidCare Evaluation Year 3 Report pp. 44,45 Agency for Health Care Administration. Notes: New enrollees were not included in this graph; only those enrollees who were “established enrollees” in each program at the time of the survey are included. Families were interviewed using the CSHCN Screener. All children in CMS are prescreened by CMS staff to ensure that they have a CSHCN. However, the CSHCN Screener, identification of 77 percent CSHCN in CMS, results reflect parent perception of the child's health. Families with less than a high school education were found by Shenkman and Bono to underreport the presence of special needs.

Specialty services for children need to be available in all insurance programs. All children can experience injury, trauma or debilitating illness at some point in childhood.

An important indication of the quality of care received is “Customer Friendliness” or a family's perceptions of their health care plan and the services provided. It is important for all children and families to be treated with courtesy and respect, but for CSHCN it is critical to the family and child's well being. Chronic illness is a family stressor and adequate support of families is related to maintaining healthy behaviors and appropriate access of health care services that could be life saving.(2) CSHCN families rated the quality of services they received from Florida's Children's Medical Services very high on a number of indicators.

Figure 27: Percent of Families Served Reporting a Positive Evaluation of Care Provided by Children's Medical Services (1999 and 2001 KidCare Children)

Note: Data is from Florida's KidCare evaluation of Title XXI and Title XIX families in Children's Medical Services who applied using the single page mail-in application (Shenkman and Bono, 2000, appendices and 2002 p. 63).