Your child should not only see the pediatrician for an illness. It is also important to schedule well-child-care exams regularly, beginning in infancy. Also called well-care visits or checkups, these routine examinations provide the best opportunity for the doctor to observe the progress of your child’s physical and mental growth and development; to counsel and teach parents; to detect problems through screening tests; to provide immunizations, and to get to know one another. Well-care visits are strongly recommended as part of preventive pediatric care.

Immunizations are a series of shots given to children at different ages to help ward off serious, and potentially fatal,

As the circumstances of each local health market vary widely, there is no ideal ratio. Many factors dictate the appropriate ratio between physicians and patients, including the number of insured and uninsured patients in the market, referral patterns, commuting patterns for subspecialty care, the disease burden of the community, the presence of an academic medical center, and an overall number of physicians.