Creating an Integrated Child/Adolescent Mental Health System of Care in the South Bronx

The concept of a “system of care” has been talked about since the early 1980's. Yet true implementation of such a system is difficult to achieve for many organizations. In 2004, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York's Community Mental Health Services Division was invited by the New York State Office of Mental Health to take control of the operations of one such project – the FRIENDS Program – in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx. Currently, the FRIENDS program is one of an array of separately funded yet complementary children's mental health programs all providing services out of the same facility in the South Bronx. Each program functions under a separate funding stream, and is contracted to offer a discrete mental health service with corresponding outcomes to this very needy population. After several years of operating in this traditional manner, it became clear that the families served would receive more collaborated, comprehensive, seamless and thorough care if the programs functioned not as independent entities, but as an integrated system. This presentation will illustrate our efforts to integrate each of these distinct children's programs into one comprehensive system of care, aimed at meeting the mental health and psychosocial needs of the families in this vastly underserved community. Additionally we will include data related to client outcomes such as scores from the Youth Outcome Questionnaire (YOQ), Peabody SFSS (17 Question version), Caregiver Strain Scale and school attendance data, to illustrate the effectiveness of creating a non-traditional integrated collaborative care delivery system.