Community Pediatrics

The New York Children's Health Project (NYCHP) brings comprehensive high-quality primary healthcare services to homeless, medically underserved and severely disadvantaged children, parents and youth across New York City, providing them with a complete "medical home."

• Mobile health care teams - made up of pediatric and family medicine practitioners, nurses and support personnel - deliver care at 13 sites throughout the city via custom-designed mobile medical units or on-site shelter clinics on a regular weekly or twice weekly schedule.
• Locations include transitional homeless family shelters, a drop-in center for runaway street youth in Harlem and two shelters for victims of domestic violence.
• Through a unique initiative, the program also brings women and children from several domestic violence shelters and safe homes across the city into care at NYCHP service delivery sites.

The NYCHP was established in 1987 in response to a visit by pediatrician and child health advocate Irwin Redlener, MD, and singer/songwriter Paul Simon to a welfare hotel where more than 1,000 homeless children were living with their families in crowded, deplorable conditions.

The program began by serving one shelter site using a custom-designed mobile medical unit equipped with highly skilled personnel and a computerized patient tracking system, and quickly grew to become one of the largest providers of healthcare services to homeless children in the nation.

Since 1990, the NYCHP has been incorporated into Montefiore, and is now a part of the Community Pediatric Programs. The program draws on the rich resources of The Children's Hospital at Montefiore to provide homeless children, parents and youth with the most comprehensive care possible.

Since its inception in 1987, the NYCHP has provided more than 270,000 health encounters to nearly 60,000 patients.