SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) Dental health is often overlooked as a necessary component to the overall health of a child.
(b) The Children and Families Commission of Orange County has initiated a program to provide basic preventative dental diagnosis, including comprehensive education to families and providers including pediatricians, nurses, and preschool teachers.
(c) Orange County was selected as the only National Children’s Study Vanguard Center in California and the commission is the local sponsor of a countywide network of programs serving the early childhood health and learning of the community. The National Children’s Study is the largest long-term study of environmental and genetic effects on children’s health and has the potential for researchers to better understand how children’s genes and their environments interact to affect their health and development.
(d) The Kellogg Foundation selected the commission as one of eight national projects that will be highlighted in the final report entitled “Health Matters: The Role of Health in Place-Based Initiatives for Young Children” to identify and explore innovative and successful multisector initiatives that focus on young children, actively engage health and other sectors, and have the potential to serve as models and as a source of lessons learned.
(e) The commission has an existing, highly recognized infrastructure that could be used to facilitate and manage a pilot program that will focus on ensuring children from the prenatal stage to six years of age, inclusive, receive preventative health services to enhance early childhood development in the areas of dental health, developmental screenings, and immunizations.
(f) Providing a full range of testing and screenings for vision, speech, hearing, and other medical conditions to identify related developmental delays before a child is three years of age can result in earlier treatment and thus avoid potential learning delays and costly interventions if the health condition is diagnosed later.
(g) Increasing the number of children that are adequately immunized with four doses of DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis/whooping cough); three doses of polio; and one dose of MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) before their second birthday is a preventative health strategy for young children resulting in less susceptibility to childhood illnesses.
(h) The commission currently funds multiyear programs that provide children’s dental, developmental screening, and immunization services with Proposition 10 tobacco tax revenues in conjunction with other public agencies, private foundations, or individuals who enter into a children’s health care partnership.