Credit: (Obrázok od Anemone123 via Pixabay) The New Jersey Pediatric Psychiatric Collaborative, a partnership between primary care doctors and mental health providers, is now set to be able to offer more preventive resources to keep children out of emergency rooms across the state.
Earlier this year, lawmakers added $12 million in funding for the effort. On Thursday, legislative leaders and others gathered at the Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune to highlight that money and stress the need for more mental health support for young people on the first day of Youth Suicide Prevention Week.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, New Jersey was among a number of states that saw an increase in adolescent suicide, according to an April 2022 research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics.
“We’ve been building up over the past several years to provide consultation services to pediatricians who are seeing kids and families in their office and provide mental health support to them,” said Dr. Ramon Solhkhah, the co-founder and principal investigator of the Pediatric Psychiatric Collaborative and the chair of the department of psychiatry at the Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center.
In existence for eight years, the collaborative, Solhkhah said, is now composed of more than 652 pediatricians in the state and participating pediatricians have screened over 212,000 patients for mental health and behavioral health issues.
Helping primary care doctors
The program began as a way to help primary care physicians better manage mental health issues for children and adolescents, according to Dr. Melissa Wallach, a pediatrician at the K. Hovnanian Children’s Hospital at Jersey Shore University Medical Center.
“Basically, it is a program where I would see a patient in the office for whatever reason, whether it’s a well visit or maybe they are coming in because they’re depressed or anxious, or even (have) ADHD … and if I assess the child and thought they needed something beyond what I could do as a primary care doctor, I would refer them to the collaborative,” Wallach said.
During the pandemic, 37% of young people experienced poor mental health and 44% experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, according to a March 2022 press release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This has been a really great way to get access for mental health to our patients in a more timely manner and it also has empowered me as a primary care doctor to feel more comfortable managing and diagnosing and treating these kids,” Wallach said.
There is a significant need for mental health resources and that demand is seen through an increased volume in emergency department visits for mental health and addiction-related services, said Dr. Kenneth N. Sable, a regional president for Hackensack Meridian Health.
“By this collaborative and investing money and resources that we can put out in the community, and we can put in schools, we can put in places where people live, that’s going to hopefully help prevent these emergent crises with people having to come to the emergency department in an already crowded environment,” Sable said.
Emergency room visits
Throughout 2019, approximately 36 out of every 1,000 emergency department visits among 12- to 17-year-olds in New Jersey resulted in a diagnosis for anxiety, according to a bulletin from the New Jersey Hospital Association’s Center for Health Analytics, Research and Transformation (CHART). Last year, that increased to 49 per 1,000, an approximately 36% increase.
Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex) joined Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Burlington) and Assistant Commissioner Mollie Greene from the Department of Children and Families to promote more mental health support for young people on the first day of Youth Suicide Prevention Week. That call to focus on youth mental health echoes the platform set forth by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer when he declared his “Strengthening Youth Mental Health Initiative” as the new chairman of the National Governors Association.
“Folks in the hospital told me it’s the first time they think there’s ever been a mental health press conference following the budget and that’s because of the real investment and you can see the enthusiasm among the people who are on the front line,” Coughlin said.
State lawmakers allocated a total of $480.5 million in grants-in-aid money to the Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services within the human services department in the 2023 fiscal year budget.
