Rights and Great Responsibilities of Academic Pediatricians

Abraham Jacobi, in his first address to the newly formed American Pediatric Society over 100 years ago, stated, “Questions of public hygiene and medicine are both professional and social. Thus, every physician is by destiny a citizen of the commonwealth with many rights and great responsibilities.” Accordingly, pediatricians have rights and great responsibilities to advocate for children who may be at particularly high risk for adverse outcomes. Often, well-intentioned policies or interventions can have tragic unexpected consequence for these children. In many circumstances, policies are developed by providers, policymakers, and others who may act without sufficient information to understand how a particular policy might adversely affect vulnerable populations. Thus, academic pediatricians should fulfill their great responsibilities by identifying signals from the populations they serve that may indicate unintended consequences of policies, performing the highest quality research and discovery to evaluate these signals, and disseminating the information back to the appropriate decision-makers to ensure that policies and interventions result in optimal outcomes for all children.