BCHNP Annual Report | Boston Children's Hospital

BCHNP’S OVERARCHING GOALS

Increase access to high quality, culturally relevant behavioral health services for children and adolescents;

Promote healthy social-emotional development in youth;

Build the sustainable behavioral health capacity of partner organizations;

Promote systemic change in behavioral health service delivery; and

Provide services that achieve a high rate of satisfaction with all stakeholders.

Social, emotional, and behavioral health builds the foundation for all other aspects of child development and well-being. Children growing up in urban communities with high poverty rates may experience challenges that could put them at greater risk for social, emotional, and behavioral health concerns, including family stress, financial insecurity, and exposure to interpersonal and community violence. Additionally, there are often formidable barriers faced by families when attempting to access behavioral health services to address concerns.

BCHNP seeks to reduce these barriers through partnering with schools in three primary ways:

1) Full Service Partner Schools: BCHNP clinicians work onsite in these partnering schools to provide a full spectrum of clinical, early intervention, and prevention and promotion services to students, as well as professional development, consultation, and capacity building services to each school’s community. A BCHNP study of three-year outcomes is published in the Journal of School Health (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31144328).

2) Clough Foundation Training and Access Project (TAP) Partner Schools: BCHNP-TAP consultants provide high quality professional development and consultation over the course of a two year partnership with the goal of building the capacity of these partnering schools to develop the systems, protocols, and procedures needed to effectively and sustainably address the social, emotional, and behavioral health needs of their students. The evaluation of this professional development and consultation model has been accepted for publication in 2020 by Children and Schools.

3) Community and School Collaborations: BCHNP clinicians provide a specific professional development, consultation, and/or capacity building service or services to meet a targeted need in these schools, health centers, and other community agencies.

Our Model

BCHNP is committed to integrating evidence-based practices with the voices of students, families, and school communities in order to provide services that are high quality, innovative, and culturally relevant.

BCHNP’s service delivery model is consistent with the multi-tiered system of supports model (MTSS; Hess et al., 2012; Stoiber, 2014). This best practice model, as shown in the figure below, is aligned with the public health model of stepped care with each level of service increasing in intensity for students with higher levels of need, as shown in figure below.

Services provided at each partner school are individualized based on a variety of factors relevant to each school’s needs and resources. To learn more about each of these services and the outcomes associated with them, please click on each section of the triangle below.

Clinical Intervention
Crisis Encounters: 270
Individual Therapy: 50 Students
Early Intervention
Care Coordination: 199 Students
Targeted Groups: 95 Students
Prevention & Promotion
Classroom Interventions: 993 Students
Capacity Building
Behavioral Health Workshops: 2128 Participants
Behavioral Health Consultation: 1438 Hours

Overall, in the 2018-2019 school year:

1409

Total students reached

416

Students reached through clinical and early intervention services

Our Full Service and TAP Partner Schools

17

Total number of partner schools

8737

Total number of students enrolled in partner schools

BCHNP’s partner schools educate students who have historically faced and continue to face significant health disparities, including reduced access to effective prevention services and treatment.

BCHNP Partner Schools Sociodemographic Data

Each year, BCHNP conducts a needs assessment with staff in all partner schools in order to gain a range of information that helps guide service delivery. As seen below, school staff recognize that behavioral health needs are impacting their students’ educational experience, yet they report that their schools and they themselves are not well equipped to address these needs.

In the charts that follow, the colors have the following meanings:

Agree
Disagree

Percent of School Staff Who Believe Behavioral Health Challenges Impair Their Ability to Focus on Teaching (N = 488 Staff Members)

Percent of School Staff Who View Behavioral Health Challenges as a Significant Barrier to Learning for Their Students (N = 489 Staff Members)

Percent of School Staff Who Think Their School Has Sufficient Resources to Address Student Behavioral Health Needs (N = 488 Staff Members)

Percent of School Staff Who Feel Confident in Their Ability to Address Student Behavioral Health Needs (N = 500 Staff Members)

Our Clinicians

21

Total BCHNP Staff Members

10

Number of BCHNP Staff Social Workers

5

Number of BCHNP Staff Psychologists

146

Number of Collective Years of Experience Working in Schools

BCHNP social workers and psychologists are trained in a variety of evidence-based programs and participate in regular peer supervision and consultation groups that support ongoing fidelity to culturally relevant care and evidence-based models.

This ongoing training is supplemented by understanding the needs of our community through regular solicitation of information via interviews, focus groups, and many measures and surveys.

Interview with a BCHNP Clinician