What is CAMP?
The Colorado Adolescent Maternity Program
(CAMP) is one of the oldest adolescent-oriented maternity programs in the
- the
frequency of late and inadequate prenatal care among pregnant adolescents
- the
disproportionately large number of preterm babies born to adolescent
mothers
- the high
rate of pregnancy, school failure, and
welfare dependency among adolescent parents and their younger siblings
- the
prevalence of developmental delays, abuse, and neglect among the children
of adolescents
The target population is socioeconomically constrained
(90% of patients rely on publicly subsidized health insurance), but racially
and ethnically diverse (40% White, 30% Hispanic, 25% Black, and 5% Oriental and
Native American). Annually the program enrolls approximately 250 newly pregnant
teenagers. CAMP also and provides care
to more than 500 additional teen-headed families and 50 to 75 never-pregnant,
younger sisters and daughters of teenage mothers.
CAMP is a
comprehensive multidisciplinary prenatal, delivery and postnatal care
program. A case management format is
used to combine the professional services of physicians, nurse midwives,
physician's assistants, home visiting case managers, a social worker, and a
dietician. This makes it possible for
teenage parents, their children, and their younger sisters to receive the full
continuum of maternity, delivery, and acute and preventive child and teen care
simultaneously from a single team of health and social service care providers.
The CAMP intervention is based on the premises that the family is the basic
social unit and that adolescents require additional encouragement and support
to have healthy babies, engage in development-promoting activities, postpone additional
childbearing, and become nurturing parents. Participants are treated as
resources to be developed (not problems to be managed). Family involvement is strongly encouraged so
that the prevention message is as constant and long lasting as possible and the
teens do not feel caught in a crosscurrent of conflicting messages from the
program and home. During pregnancy and the early child rearing period the staff
emphasizes the advantages of completing high school and delaying childbearing
beyond adolescence rather than the disadvantages of not doing so. They also stress that pregnancy prevention is
not an end in itself, but a means of attaining a life style the teenager is apt
to desire. Finally, the CAMP staff makes
every effort to enhance family support and help socially isolated teenagers and
their families establish linkages to community service organizations and
agencies. Periodic risk assessments help the staff tailor the intervention to
individual family needs and allocate scarce, costly services to those most apt
to benefit. To avoid duplicating services, numerous collaborations and linkages
with community service organizations and agencies have
been established. Staff members coordinate the care these groups provide. When service gaps are identified, they use
the special, adolescent-oriented medical, social, transportation, and nutrition
services CAMP offers to fill these needs. Conversely, when a participant's
needs exceed the range of services available in CAMP, the staff has a battery
of community resources to draw upon.
As
discussed in the section entitled “Why is CAMP different”,
selection of the various components of the CAMP prenatal, postpartum, and
sisters programs was based on the consensus that the majority of the medical
complications associated with adolescent childbearing can be reduced or
eliminated by providing early, consistent prenatal care within the context of a
comprehensive, multidisciplinary program, designed to meet teenagers' unique
nutritional, psychosocial, and educational needs. Extending this type of care beyond the
pregnant teenager and the immediate postpartum period and providing aggressive
postpartum follow up, with a strong emphasis on family, career, and lifestyle
planning is the best way to minimize the long-term psychosocial and economic
morbidities associated with childbearing at this 
age.
To understand why this is so important, please see the section entitled
“Why is CAMP”.