UTMB Montgomery County Health Department is a local provider of Reach Out and Read, a national non-profit organization that gives free books to children when they come to doctors’ offices for a checkup.

Multiple studies show that children exposed to books in their preschool years develop better reading skills in school and better social performance later in life.  Unfortunately, limited access to books, due to expense or of lack of parental interest, is causing more and more children to grow up without the early experience of having books read to them and learning to read on their own.

Early childhood educators and pediatricians at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center) recognized the connection between literacy and health by founding Reach Out and Read in 1989.

Program sponsors recognized that health care providers have a unique opportunity to promote literacy because they regularly interact with parents and children and parents tend to respect the guidance doctors provide in exam rooms.
Reach Out and Read soon became a national initiative, and more than 3000 programs exist in every U.S. state, and in Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Literacy programs modeled after Reach Out and Read have been started in Italy, Israel, the Philippines, England, Bangladesh and Canada.

Reach Out and Read was recognized at the White House Conference on Global Literacy in 2006, and it won the UNESCO International Reading Association Literacy Award in 2007.  This year Reach Out and Read Doctors and Nurses will distribute 4.6 million books to 2.8 million U.S. infants, toddlers and preschoolers with a special emphasis on children growing up in poverty. 
 
The University of Texas Medical Branch joined Reach out and Read in 2000, when residents, medical students and nurse practitioners helped set up the program in Texas City and Friendswood. The initiative later expanded to UTMB pediatric clinics throughout Southeast Texas, and the UTMB clinic in Montgomery County signed on in January 2004.

Children between six months and five years of age who come to well-child visits at the clinic may receive up to nine age-appropriate books in their language of choice. Since the program started in Conroe, over 6000 books have been distributed. 

For more information about Reach Out and Read or to volunteer to read books to children, please call 936-525-2800 or email info.mchd@utmb.edu.