Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is the recipient of close to $1 million, 26-month grant from Cook County Health’s Stronger Together: Building a More Equitable Behavioral Health System in Cook County Initiative. With this funding, hospital mental health specialists will train and support primary care providers at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) serving under-resourced neighborhoods in Chicago, in order to build much needed capacity for prevention, early identification and intervention for the most commonly presenting psychiatric conditions in primary care among children – anxiety, depression and ADHD.
Cook County faces a severe shortage of child and adolescent mental health specialists, with only 19 providers for every 100,000 children, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. This is in stark contrast to what is considered sufficient, or 47 providers for every 100,000 children.
To tackle this shortage, Lurie Children’s created in 2018 the Mood, Anxiety, ADHD Collaborative Care (MAACC) Program, which partners with 46 community pediatric offices, representing 276 pediatric clinicians. This partnership has served over 1,400 youth over the past five years. The current project builds on the MAACC framework to advance health equity and expand mental health capacity in under-resourced Chicago community areas.
“We are very excited to expand the MAACC program and employ equitable, culturally responsive and community-informed strategies to reach more kids who are struggling amidst the current youth mental health crisis,” said Co-Principal Investigator John Parkhurst, PhD, child and adolescent psychologist who leads the MAACC Program and is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We have documented improved patient outcomes through our MAACC program and hope to replicate this success in pediatric clinics where the need is greatest.”
Dr. Parkhurst and colleagues recently published in Frontiers in Psychiatry journal the great outcomes of the MAACC program. Results demonstrated improved access and significant improvements in patients with anxiety, depression and ADHD. They concluded that collaborative care can effectively provide high quality care while cultivating increased primary care treatment capacity and building on existing community resources.
“The MAACC program also was designed to facilitate pediatric clinician independence in treatment and, consequently, result in reductions in clinical referral volumes as clinicians develop more confidence in their treatment of common mental health concerns,” said Dr. Parkhurst. “More than 80 percent of primary care clinicians reported improved independence and confidence in treatment, which greatly increases mental health capacity.”
In addition to using the MAACC model, the current project will leverage the community relationships built through the All Hands Health Network (AHHN), a Lurie Children’s collaborative formed in 2021. AHHN is a clinically and socially integrated network of pediatric primary care practices, community behavioral health agencies, and community-based organizations in the Belmont-Cragin and Austin communities. AHHN has documented increased care quality, efficiency, and resource coordination for children and families served.
“AHHN is an innovative and impactful model that collectively works to address the mental health needs of children in some of Chicago’s most underserved communities,” said Co-Principal Investigator Marilyn Sampilo, PhD, child and adolescent psychologist at Lurie Children’s and Director of Behavioral Health for AHHN, as well as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This project builds on AHHN and will substantially increase available mental health programming in partner FQHCs, allowing us to reach more communities. It will complement and supplement the benefits that AHHN already provides.”
Stronger Together: Building a More Equitable Behavioral Health System in Cook County Initiative aims to address behavioral health inequities across the region’s system of care through increased systems alignment, enhanced system quality, and the expansion of access to early intervention and prevention, treatment, support, recovery, and crisis assessment and care. This initiative, led by the Office of Behavioral Health at Cook County Health, is supported by funds from the U.S. Department of Treasury, under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago is a nonprofit organization committed to providing access to exceptional care for every child. It is ranked as one of the nation’s top children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. For almost 60 years, the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Lurie Children’s has provided psychiatric and psychological services to families and their children of all ages, from every social and economic background. Lurie Children’s is the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.