Increasing Access to Comprehensive Care for Youth in Schools: How One Community-Academic Partnership is Accomplishing It

In Spring 2013, an interdisciplinary team of community and academic stakeholders from Harvard University, Cambridge Health Alliance, Tufts University Family Medicine Residency, Institute for Community Health, Malden Public Schools, and the greater Malden community, formed a collaborative partnership with a mission to provide increased access to comprehensive care for youth at Malden High School (MHS).  To accomplish this, an inventive model for delivering comprehensive, teen-centered primary care services at MHS was developed.  A school clinic was established, offering group education visits with a health counselor and individual visits with a resident physician for primary care, and a referral process was developed for when health needs go beyond the capacity of the clinical services at the clinic.

The two biggest challenges were: 1. Earning trust from the school administration and greater community and 2. Gaining support from the school committee to approve a policy allowing reproductive health services to be offered within the school environment. In December 2013, approval from the policy school sub-committee was received to implement full-spectrum services.  Additional accomplishments to-date include: performing a needs assessment and evaluation of student health priorities, development of a clinical structure, and creating a referral system to link students to other needed services in the community. 

This presentation will describe the process of how multiple stakeholders collaborated to develop and build the components of the school clinic, how the project team gained support from the school stakeholders, how barriers were overcame, and the lessons learned from this partnership.