Opinion: Amid a Mental Health Crisis, Foster Children Are Forgotten

May 19, 2023

(Undark) – Foster children are far more likely to be victims of abuse and to require individualized education plans and mental health care — services that schools, health care organizations, and governmental agencies often struggled to provide during the pandemic. Meanwhile, foster children, many of whom lacked access to primary care even before the pandemic, have been undertargeted by Covid-19 education and vaccination campaigns, potentially leading to high rates of vaccine hesitancy and greater risk of infection.

Yet researchers still don’t know the full extent of the pandemic’s toll on foster children, and we may never know. That’s because foster children do not fit neatly into our existing models of clinical care and research, and the medical field has done little to include them. (Read More)