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Oregon’s Children’s Mental Health Taskforce

The Oregon’s Children’s Mental Health Taskforce has met on a quarterly basis since November 2008. The Oregon’s Children’s Mental Health Taskforce began as a collaboration between Oregon Pediatric Society (OPS) and Oregon Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (OCCAP) with the goal of integrating mental health services and primary care for children. The Taskforce Charter created in the summer of 2009, states:

VISION: An integrated children’s health system in Oregon that monitors social-emotional development, identifies risk and challenge, and provides effective and appropriate treatment to assure that all children, adolescents and their families achieve optimum health and development.

MISSION: To strengthen the collaboration between children’s mental health systems and primary care providers through service delivery and policy changes that improve the quality of children’s mental health care

VALUES

We believe……

  1. That all children deserve accessible quality healthcare
  2. That an integrated children’s health system is the essential provider of coordinated mental health care
  3. That psychiatric illness in children is frequently under-recognized, and often insufficiently treated
  4. That early identification and treatment yields better outcomes for children and their families
  5. That children and families are most effectively treated when providers of mental health and primary care collaborate
  6. That collaboration and integration require sustainable financial models
  7. That a child’s developing total health occurs with a  family’s cultural tradition and requires careful honor, respect and attention

GOALS:

  1. To provide a forum for open, honest, and informed discussion of new and emerging best  practices in the children’s mental health and integration field
  2. To focus on the alignment of children’s mental health and primary care integration and quality improvement activities
  3. To generate collaborative projects that promote improved integration of children’s mental health within primary care

OPAL-K: Oregon’s Psychiatric Access Line for Kids

OPAL-K is a program that the OPS and OCCAP have been working towards over the past year. The goal is to establish phone access to child psychiatric consultation for the primary care sector.  The model for this project evolved from similar projects in Massachusetts – MCPAP; and Washington State– PAL. Both projects have demonstrated successful integration with the primary care sector and have demonstrated cost savings with decreased MH emergency ER visits and higher quality of psychotropic usage for foster children.

The goals of OPAL-K are:

  1. Improve mental health care delivery in primary care, improved access to timely mental health consultation and triage within the primary care sector
  2. Improve the cost effectiveness of children and adolescent mental health care.

Recent News:

Sept. 24, 2009 – Jane Meschan Foy, MD, FAAP speaks at the Oregon Pediatric Society’s (OPS) and the Oregon Council of Child and Adolescent Pediatrics’s (OCCAP) meeting of the Oregon’s Children’s Mental Health Taskforce

If you are interested in participating in the Oregon Children’s Mental Health Taskforce or OPAL-K contact Dr. David Willis, The Artz Center Medical Director at 503-802-5290 or dwwillis@artzcenter.org.