Interview Assessment #1

Assessment #6

Name of person interviewed: ​Dr. Kristen Reeder

Profession: ​Pediatrician working in Referral and Evaluation of At Risk Children (REACH) team

Location and business name:​ UT Southwestern affiliated, works at Children’s Medical Center

Dallas in REACH clinic

Date of interview: ​10/23/2020

Time: ​11:00 AM

Dr. Kristen Reeder is one of the only few doctors working at a child abuse evaluation

team (REACH) in the North Texas area, and in America. Her experience in pediatrics and child

abuse was what made me very excited to interview her because she had specific information I

could use for my Original Work. The objective of this interview was to find out as much as I

could about her role in child abuse prevention, and learn about what the REACH team actually

does. Some of the topics we covered was how she became a board certified Child Abuse

Pediatrician, what her daily life looks life, and how the child evaluations go in the REACH

clinic.

She became a Child Abuse Pediatrician by taking the Boards exam and did this because

she was interested in doing the medical evaluations for child abuse cases that come into the

hospital. Her responsibilities vary from day to day, sometimes it’s evaluating a child for child

abuse, testifying in court, or teaching fellows at the REACH clinic. Her specilaty in child abuse

evaluations is sexual abuse so we talked about how those evaluations go. Usually the parent is in
the room with the child, she asks very objective and direct questions while still remaining

respectful. Something that I didn’t expect her to emphasize was the importance of being

objective when evaluating a child. She mentioned multiple times that many people may have “a

stereotypical idea” of what a child abuser may look like, but in reality, “anyone could abuse their

kids'' and even the most unexpected families can do it. That’s why it’s extremely important to go

off what the medical exams and tests say because they usually don’t present false or

misconstrued information. She also mentioned working very closely with the CPS, DA’s office,

and rest of the hospital to provide medical information . The REACH team can actually even

testify as an unbiased and purley medical opinion if the child abuse gets to court. This was really

interesting because this works completely outside the realm of what a PEM doctor can do, which

gave me a new perspective on how certain issues are taken care of by specialized groups and

each professional must stick to their own niche.

I will use the information from this interview mostly in my Original Work because it was

focused on child abuse. The main thing that I drew from her was the importance of being

objective, which I will definitely try to highlight in my Curriculum book. I will also reference the

REACH team as a cerbile consultant for PEM doctors to reach out to for child abuse cases.

Overall, this interview was extremely informational and useful to getting an introduction of child

abuse and how they take care of it in society.