Research and Professional Development 6 - Serving Underserved Communities: Program Development Innovations to Meet Patients Where They Actually Are

Populations who are chronically underserved remain underserved because often overwhelmed and under resourced mental health systems are unable or unwilling to serve them. This typically further increases the gap in mental health disparities within high needs areas. To better address this gap, mental health systems need to increase innovation and collaboration at the program development level to meet patients where they are in creative and sustainable ways.
The Child/Adolescent Outpatient Psychiatry Department at Montefiore works to serve a traditionally underserved population in the North Bronx in NYC. Many of our patients and families face multiple, intersectional systemic stressors based on systems of oppression (e.g., race/ethnicity, immigration status, socio-economic class). These stressors make accessing and engaging in high-quality, specialty psychotherapy services particularly challenging.
This moderated panel will include presenters representing four subspecialty programs within this clinic: the Anxiety and Mood Program, Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Adolescents, Arts and Integrative Medicine, and Eating Disorders Program. After a brief overview of our patient population and common barriers they face, each panelist will orient participants to their program and highlight a unique way each has innovated and adapted to provide our families with evidence-based psychotherapy services, including practical steps and recommendations that can be generalized to other settings and systems.
Topics will include integrating standardized, measurement-based care and empirical data collection; maintaining fidelity to empirically supported treatments; leveraging and engaging community resources and partnerships, and collaborating across multidisciplinary teams and levels of care. After initial presentations, panelists will answer a series of questions and discuss strategies for navigating system limitations, making programs sustainable in terms of provider and system resources, and meeting families where they are. Remaining time will be spent in conversation with the audience members, making space for collaboration between panelists and audience members to address additional challenges and creative problem solving.