Understanding FCC today requires a review of historical developments. The first hospital to care exclusively for children was the L’Hopital Des Enfants-Malades in Paris in 1802 [
19] and, in the United States, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1855. Families in the hospital setting were relegated to a visitor or attendant role [
11]. In parallel, families of children with intellectual impairments were encouraged to institutionalize their children at facilities such as the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children in Massachusetts [
20].
Midway through the twentieth century, with the increased recognition of child/family separation trauma in the inpatient setting, hospital policies were altered to allow for rooming-in, open visiting hours, sibling visits, and accompanying children to surgeries [
11]. Hospital inpatient rounds, which had moved away from the bedside and to the conference room [
21], began to move back towards the bedside [
22]. Family advocates played a large role in changing hospital-based care for children and their families, just as they were central to the process of promoting the deinstitutionalization of children with intellectual and other disabilities in their communities [
23]. Family advocates were essential to the passage of the first special education law (P.L. 94–142) in 1975, the Early Intervention “Part C” several years later, and the first Katie Beckett Home and Community-Based Medicaid Waiver in 1982 that enabled many children and adults with disabilities and chronic conditions to be cared for at home.
Family advocacy for children with special needs subsequently extended into the health care policy arena. With the backing of family advocates, the MCHB and the US Surgeon General sponsored several national conferences on children with special health care needs in the mid-1980s [
24]. Pediatricians, researchers, and policymakers heard from families who spoke about what it took to care for their children at home; the importance of partnerships, trust, and respect with their children’s health professionals; and the benefits of joint decision-making. In 1987 the Surgeon General called for “coordinated, family-centered, community-based care for children with special health care needs and their families” [
25]. In 1989 the MCHB changed its mission to read: “Provide and promote family-centered, community-based, coordinated care for children with special health care needs and to facilitate the development of community-based systems of services for such children and their families” [
15].
Starting in the 1990s, the MCHB supported medical home learning collaboratives and the national grassroots family network, Family Voices, leading to family-to-family health information centers in every state. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine named PCC as crucial for health care quality [
1], and by 2003, the AAP had incorporated FCC into multiple policy statements and affirmed FCC as the standard of health care for all children [
2]. FCC and PCC appear in Healthy People 2020 as key outcomes of CSHCN receiving care in a “family-centered, comprehensive, coordinated system” [
4], and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act calls for the establishment of a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute [
26].