Pediatric Staff
Meet our team at Sandhills Pediatrics!
At Sandhills Pediatrics, we consider it both a great joy and responsibility to care for children and we strive to be understanding and available to the families we are privileged to serve. We are honored that you have chosen us as your child's primary medical home and are confident that you will be pleased with the quality of care and service that we can provide you and your family.
A vital part of our service to children begins with our outstanding staff who works hard to manage and maintain a professional, caring and supportive environment for our patients in a timely manner. Our doctors and nurse practitioners are lifelong learners who received advanced medical training in pediatrics and continually pursue ongoing education to stay abreast of the latest in child health care.
Your child's health is as important to us as it is to you. We look forward to providing you with excellent medical care your child deserves.
Welcome (to your Patient Centered Medical) Home!
What is a Patient-Centered Medical Home?
The Medical Home is an innovative, team-based approach to providing healthcare. It was invented by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1967 and is a way of providing enhanced primary care. Sandhills Pediatrics has been recognized by NCQA as a PCMH since 5/27/2010.
Our goal is to develop a partnership between the patient, parents, the primary MD/NP and the health care team. We want to help educate the child and the responsible adult to develop plans for self-management of their health and healthcare!
Working together with you and following evidence-based guidelines for medical care, our team will coordinate to provide the best health care services possible.
What are the benefits ?
Team based care
We all work together as a team to take excellent care of your “whole child”. This includes coordinating care of your child across multiple settings and mental health. We do expect you to pick a primary care clinician, but you are always free to see a different doctor or NP. We will enter your primary care clinician in our computer system to make arranging appointments easier.
It is our goal to provide you and your child with strategies and tools to make it easy for you to self-manage chronic illnesses (eg, Asthma, Diabetes, ADHD) based on the best evidence-based medicine.
Improved Access
SHP understands that when you are worried about your child you want help ASAP! We are trying several different approaches to increase available appointments. We have opened an office in Raeford (June 2011), more than doubled the clinic space in 7 Lakes (Nov. 2012) and have added additional doctors and NPs to better meet demand.
The fastest way to make an appointment is by calling the call center at 910-692-2444 during office hours.
We are exploring online appointment requests for nonurgent appointments.
We also offer a direct link to healthychildren.org at the top right of this page, which is an AAP educational resource.
Improved Communication
We have invested in a call center to better organize appointments and decrease wait time, rather than having appointments made by office staff distracted with other tasks. We also have our phone triage nurses to help you with medical questions 8am-8pm Mon-Friday. Once the office closes, we have Triage nurses based in Chapel Hill who take urgent calls all night long. Our on-call doctor backs up the triage nurses 24/7 to handle any questions that they can not.
Our team follows up on the faxed summary of each of those calls the next business day we are open and reaches out to those children who need follow-up.
If you miss appointments with specialists or do not have lab tests done that we order, our quality specialists will follow-up with you to help remind you.
We have established a Parent Advisory council to make sure we are meeting the needs of our families.
After hours
It is our goal for you to visit us in your medical home for comprehensive, coordinated primary care instead of the more expensive Emergency Room or Urgent Care. We are open in the Southern Pines office Mon-Friday 6p-8pm and Saturdays (and most holidays) 8a-12 noon.
When we are closed the triage nurses in Chapel Hill can help you figure out if you really need to go to the ER afterhours or can wait until we open.
How can you help us?
We are most effective as a medical home when we have complete information about care you have obtained elsewhere.
We are most effective as a medical home when we have complete information about care you (or your child) has obtained elsewhere.
Please let us know at every visit about the patient:
- what medications the patient is taking, including over-the-counter and vitamins/supplements
- seen a specialist or another doctor?
- any changes in medical history or health status?
- any recent medical test results?
- any self-care information to discuss (eg, asthma care plans, food allergy plans)?
- been hospitalized?
- specialty care?
- emergency room or urgent care visits?
- received vaccines anywhere else? (even “just” a flu shot so we can keep a fully accurate vaccine record!)
- make sure we have correct phone numbers and addresses for your child!
We can even text appointment reminders if you prefer! You would need do both of the following
1. Tell our checkin/checkout staff so they can enter it in the computer
2. Text "SHPEDS" to 622-622 to opt-in. Once you send that text you'll get a response "welcoming" you.
Email is insecure, so please ask specialists or Emergency departments/urgent cares to FAX us summaries of the visit to our faxserver: 910 692 3651 (please note that Moore Regional Hospital ER does this automatically)
How we can improve?
- Participate in our patient care surveys
- Let us know if we can do something better!
History:
Sandhills Pediatrics has been serving the children of Moore County and the Sandhills region since August 1966. Dr. David Bruton and the late Bill Clarke were the founding partners and their first office was in the Town Center Building in Southern Pines. In August 1986, the practice moved into a new building at its present location on the corner of West Illinois Avenue and Bennett Street. The addition to the building was added in 1996, in order to accommodate the growing number of patients and staff.
In September 2007 Sandhills Pediatrics opened a two doctor office in 7 Lakes to serve the growing 7 Lakes region.
In June of 2011, Sandhills Pediatrics opened a satellite office in Raeford in a rental space in the FirstHealth Fitness center to serve our existing and growing Hoke County families.
In November 2011 Sandhills Pediatrics began construction in 7 Lakes on Grant Drive (next to Master Kleen, across from the former Italian Table) on a new 4-5 doctor office that opened November 19, 2012.
Sandhills Pediatrics was recognized by NCQA as a Patient Centered Medical Home, Level 2 May 27, 2010 and is currently recertifying.
Sandhills Pediatrics now has a staff of ten board-certified pediatricians and three certified Pediatric Nurse Practioners. We promise to continue the tradition of providing quality pediatric care for all the children in the Sandhills Region.
Quality Improvement:
Sandhills Pediatrics has been recognized at both the state and national level for quality improvement efforts. We have participated in the following QI efforts:
ASTHMA (see Asthma page)
Oral Rehydration (using WHO rehydation salts to rehydrate children in the office or at home, avoiding hospital admission)
Open Access (improving patient scheduling)
Reach Out and Read (promoting early childhood literacy)
ADHD Toolkit (Dr Stewart participated in learning collaborative refining the state of the art ADHD Management)
Safe and Healthy Beginnings (optimizing the handoff from hospital nursery to the office, improving jaundice management)
Post-Partum Depression screening (we screen for post-partum depression in our patient's moms at 2 and 4 mo check ups)
Bright Futures in Practice (AAP collaborative to improve risk assessments at 9 and 24 mo checkups and teen depression screens)
Quick Access
Sick Child?
View the KidsDoc Symptom Checker from HealthyChildren.org