Project Description:
The Tikun Olam Infant-Family Mental Health Initiative will enhance existing programs and add new ones to address unmet needs in infant-family and early childhood mental health. The goal of the Initiative is to develop a continuum of resilience-building support and services for infants and young children at CHLA and beyond. The Initiative will focus on evidence-based and promising innovative approaches to enhance infant development and relationships within the family, as well as between medical and behavioral health providers and the families they serve.
The Tikun Olam Infant-Family Mental Health Initiative has a two-pronged approach:
1. Training Core teaches best infant-family and early childhood practices to health care, behavioral health care and allied health professionals at CHLA and beyond.
2. Services Core supports infants, toddlers, preschoolers and their families through preventive and mental health intervention programs.
Both core areas will have a focus on leadership that includes supporting strong interdisciplinary leaders, establishing long-term sustainability through training new leaders and supporting promising policy initiatives to improve the system of preventive and mental health care for infants, toddlers, preschoolers and their families.
Through the training core, the Tikun Olam Infant-Family Mental Health Initiative will: (1) Increase the knowledge and skill of inter-professional staff at CHLA to identify infant-family mental health needs and integrate these principles into daily medical care. (2) Build the workforce of infant-family mental health practitioners in Southern California by training clinicians from other mental health and child-serving agencies to identify and treat mental health issues in infants, toddlers and preschoolers and their families.
Create a new model: We will develop a transition home and follow-up care model to support the mental health and emotional well-being of infants and their families as they transition out of intensive inpatient care and into the home environment. This will be a new program, which will be developed in partnership with nurses, social workers and physicians from the NICCU. After the past year of consultation with the NICCU and HRIF, we learned this program would provide vital additional services to these patients and families.
Objectives:
Develop and pilot a model for providing an infant-family trauma-informed mental health intervention during the period from before NICCU discharge through linkage to the HRIF clinic and community follow-up services. Provide approximately 1,000 infant-family mental health transition consultation services over five years. We predict the interventions will lead to reduced stress for families, stronger linkages for families with follow-up services, reduced cases of maternal depression, improved mental health outcomes for infants in terms of the development of self-regulation and better parent-infant attachment.
Provide inter-professional training for approximately 1,000 staff over five years, including nurses, pediatricians, psychologists, social workers, occupational and physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, and child life specialists. These trainings will be adapted from previously developed didactic and experiential trainings for mental health professionals working with infants and toddlers and will be applied to a new cohort. Training will lead to increased awareness, sensitivity and competence in addressing the mental health needs of vulnerable infants, toddlers, preschoolers and their families, and result in an increase in appropriate referrals for infant-family mental health services.
Provide Reflective Practice Facilitation training for 50 leaders in community agencies that serve our target patient population. Leaders will include those from community mental health agencies, supervisors from the Department of Children and Family Services, mental health consultants to Head Start/Early Head Start programs, hospital social work supervisors and Regional Center program managers. Training will lead to increased knowledge of infant-family and early childhood mental health principles and increased skills in a Reflective Consultation approach to support staff working with vulnerable and traumatized families with young children.
Core Function(s):
Performing Direct and/or Demonstration Services, Performing Research or Evaluation, Developing & Disseminating Information, Continuing Education/Community Training
Unserved or Under-served Populations:
Racial or Ethnic Minorities, Disadvantaged Circumstances, Limited English
