Children and youth with special health care needs bene#t greatly from community-based services that support their health, development, education, vocation, therapies, recreation and transition to adulthood. Despite this, recent data from the Data Resource Center on CYSHCN document that fully 40 percent families from Hispanic* communities do not have an easy time using community-based services (as contrasted with 32 percent of non-Hispanic whites) (http://childhealthdata.org/).1 Frequently this is because of lack of availability of services, long wait times and the absence of linguistic services. This report has been prepared for the U.S. Maternal and Child Health Bureau by the National Center for Community-Based Services (http://www.communitybasedservices.org/) to document the problems that Hispanic families of CYSHCN and their providers confront, explore innovative solutions and suggest a number of areas that warrant further policy consideration.
