Placement Changes and Emergency Department Visits in the First Year of Foster Care

Foster children received fewer overall outpatient services than did their Medicaid-eligible peers, but with age and increasing numbers of placements, had higher visit rates and received a greater proportion of their overall outpatient care in the ED. These results suggest that poor access to nonemergent ambulatory care settings might have contributed to an increasing reliance on ED settings as foster care placements increased. The temporal relationship between ED visits and placement changes underscores the need for better health care management for foster children, particularly in the period after placement changes.