Definition: Estimated percentage of children ages 0-17 with special health care needs (CSHCN) who have seen a specialist doctor—not including mental health professionals—in the previous 12 months, among those needing specialist care (e.g., in 2022, among California CSHCN who needed specialist care in the previous year, 90.3% received it).
Data Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, National Survey of Children's Health (Dec. 2023).
Footnote: Specialists other than mental health professionals are defined as "doctors like surgeons, heart doctors, allergy doctors, skin doctors, and others who specialize in one area of health care." Children with special health care needs (CSHCN) have or are at increased risk for a chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional condition and require health and related services of a type or amount beyond that required by children generally. These estimates are based on a survey of the population and are subject to both sampling and nonsampling error. The annotation [!] indicates that the margin of error for the estimate is greater than 5 percentage points but not greater than 10 percentage points. For more information, see https://www.childhealthdata.org/learn-about-the-nsch/NSCH.
