Sharing Community Perspectives
Washington Thriving partners Health Management Associates (HMA) and Full-Frame Initiative (FFI) produced a report of perspectives shared by children, youth, families and caregivers, and system partners and providers, including their experiences with the current prenatal through age 25 behavioral health system and suggestions for the future.
Community Input. The key findings and resulting recommendations in the report were informed by:
9 listening sessions conducted across the state between August and October 2024
Washington Thriving Advisory Group input and discussion
Population-focused Discussion Groups: 1) Youth and Young Adults, 2) Parents and Caregivers, and 3) System Partners
Information and input gathering across existing channels
Key communities not reached meaningfully through HMA and FFI’s 2024 community engagement include parents of young children, non-English-speaking communities, and Indigenous youth. Washington Thriving will be aiming to create opportunities to engage these communities in 2025.
Key findings
Primary themes. HMA and FFI identified consistent themes across communities, all of which are elaborated on in more detail in the full report.
Social connectedness and belonging are essential.
Community-based organizations and school activities support behavioral health in many unrecognized ways.
Negative narratives and stigma are detrimental to wellbeing.
The behavioral health system intersects with other systems, and better communication and coordination are needed.
Low awareness/visibility and barriers to accessibility of services and programs limit usage.
Cookie cutter care and inflexible regulations are limiting and often harmful.
High turnover and inconsistency in the behavioral health system creates instability for people accessing care.
Young people often lose supports as they age out of school.
The Washington Thriving Advisory Group, Discussion Groups, and other individuals with lived and living experiences shared input throughout the process that reinforced the themes above, while highlighting the following additional themes:
Age of consent presents challenges in certain situations, particularly for young people with intellectual/developmental disabilities (IDD).
Additional entry points are needed in school and community settings where pregnant people, babies, children, youth, young adults, and their families and caregivers spend time, to ensure that needs are identified and support can be accessed broadly and early.
Peers are a critical resource.
Insights related to service gaps. Ongoing discussions with individuals with lived and living experience and system partners contributing to the Washington Thriving work have highlighted gaps in services and supports in areas such as:
Screening for mental health conditions
Providers skilled in recognizing developmental delays and behavioral health symptoms at early ages
Promotion, prevention, and early intervention
Pediatric behavioral health services integrated into primary care
Parents/caregivers’ limited options for qualified behavioral health providers in
their area if their child/youth has challenging behaviors or limited coverage
Access to referrals for in-network providers
Insufficient behavioral health supports in schools
Limited options for crisis support
Limited step-downs from intensive services
The scale and specificity of these gaps needs to be quantified and understood by region, community, age and developmental stage, and specific behavioral health need. Project partners at Mercer are underway with additional work to provide data-informed evidence around the prenatal through 25 behavioral health landscape and gaps.
The expectation is that, despite the work completed throughout the development of the statewide Prenatal-through-Age-25 Behavioral Health Strategic Plan (P-25 Strategic Plan), more work will need to be done in order to realize a comprehensive representation of the statewide behavioral health landscape and the gaps that must be addressed.
Resulting recommendations for consideration in the P-25 Strategic Plan.
Expand and empower cross-system collaboration
Use resources to support building and strengthening community relationships
Substantially invest in the behavioral health workforce
Increase awareness and capacity of available resources and decrease stigma and discrimination
What’s next
How this will inform the P-25 Strategic Plan.
The P-25 Strategic Plan to be submitted in November of this year will be informed by the information presented in this report, the complimentary funding, oversight, and administration report (blog post coming soon to provide overview), and by quantitative data analyzed by Mercer.
In dialogue with the Advisory Group, the Washington Thriving project team will also be incorporating information about the current landscape and gaps coming from other workstreams, including data and insights gathered from Advisory Group meetings, Discussion Group sessions, community engagement activities, consultation with subject matter experts, and as part of the system modeling effort.
Ultimately, the various inputs and reports produced throughout this process will lead to the development of specific recommendations to be included in the P-25 Strategic Plan. These recommendations will continue to undergo an ongoing feedback loop with the Advisory Group, Discussion Groups, and other engaged parties to ensure perspectives from across communities are reflected and prioritized.
If you are interested in engaging in this process, please attend the upcoming Washington Thriving events and subscribe to the newsletter to receive monthly updates!