Webinar: COVID-19 As a Catalyst for Integrating Youth Behavioral Care

A new webinar from PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia looks at how COVID-19 has both exacerbated and illuminated the crisis of unmet need for mental and behavioral health care for children and families. Though the situation is critical, there’s hope that this could be a watershed moment for systems change.
Well Being Trust Chief Strategy Officer, Benjamin Miller, shared his expertise in the conversation about integrating care across systems for children and families in a whole-community approach. Miller shared that this is a potential moment for redesigning systems, but before focusing on how to rethink mental and behavioral care it’s important to focus on who is at the table informing these decisions.
“If we don’t have the people who we’re serving sitting at the table helping us think through what their solutions are, we’re probably going to fail.”
Most policies for youth and families around mental health don’t actually have youth and families involved in any of the creative process, he pointed out, according to a recent report from Wellbeing Trust and AcademyHealth.
Policy and systems change is hard. It’s a complex set of equations. And we’ve inherited a set of systems that has separated the mind and the body, shared Miller. “It doesn’t mean it has to be that way,” said Miller.
Watch the full webinar for more on solutions to integrating mental and behavioral health for youth and families across settings.