How We Are Linking Arms to Support the Needs of Kids and Families Across WA: Youth Behavioral Health Navigator Program

Behavioral health crises come in many forms, and most do not fit neatly into a categorical service box. No single entity or system owns full responsibility for crises, and a single entity or system is not, on its own, sufficiently leveraged to address the multi-factored complexities necessary for a healthy system. Current practice engages multiple stakeholders at many levels of leadership and various service lines and results in unclear communication and difficulty establishing a clear clinical/decision-making team. This negatively impacts patient/family experience, length of stay and degrades the ability of the clinical staff to establish an effective team process. Given the multifactorial determinants of psychiatric boarding in the ED, potential solutions will require a variety of hospital strategies, external community strategies, ideally in collaboration with one another.

To address this, The Health Care Authority (HCA) is partnering with Kids’ Mental Health Pierce County (KMHPC) and Developmental Disabilities Administration (DDA) to stand up Youth Regional Behavioral Health Navigation teams to focus on improved collaborative communication, service connection processes, and the deployment of Multidisciplinary Teams (MDT), all of which are designed to improve access to and the coordination of services for children and youth experiencing behavioral health challenges. Requests for support for young people needing intensive services will be prioritized by the Navigation teams. Join us for a collaborative conversation about this new resource and how we are bringing the community into the continuum of care.