Advocacy
Community Pediatrics
Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics
Health Services Research
Mental Health
Public Health
School and Community Health
Wellness and Well-being
Trainee
Tina Cheng, MD, MPH (she/her/hers)
Chair of Pediatrics, CMO, Director of the Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the U.S. and Canada and a time to re-focus on a major threat to child and adolescent health. In late 2021 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) declared a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health and the Surgeon General issued a rare public health advisory calling on the nation to respond to the growing mental health crisis impacting young people. The declaration specifically addressed 10 areas of advocacy including fully funding “comprehensive, community-based systems of care that connect families in need of behavioral health services and supports for their child with evidence-based interventions in their home, community or school.” Different regions are using different approaches and innovations to address this crisis. These have included multi-sector collaboration, regional coalition building, peer and family leadership, behavioral health integration in primary care, school-based care, learning health networks, community outreach, novel research proposals, and legislative action. This session reviews some multi-level approaches in different parts of the country and their emerging evidence base. Evaluation results, lessons learned, sustainability, and scalability will be discussed.
This session is co-sponsored by the Pediatric Policy Council (APA, APS, AMSPDC, SPR with AAP convening).
Speaker: Laurel K. Leslie, MD MPH (she/her/hers) – American Board of Pediatrics
Speaker: Leslie R. Walker, MD (she/her/hers) – University of Washington/Seattle Children's
Speaker: Deepa Sekhar, MD, MSc (she/her/hers) – Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine
