Doctor’s Note: May Newsletter Introduction from Dr. Lee Beers

Dear Pediatric Health Network colleagues,

As May is Mental Health Awareness Month, our Behavioral Health Initiative team would love to share updates with you on some of our activities.

• On May 1, in partnership with Children’s National and CareFirst, we hosted a Pediatric Mental Health Summit to learn about innovative solutions that increase access to children’s mental health care and other supports, with a particular focus on working collaboratively together to bring about systems change. We heard from some incredible speakers from federal agencies, national organizations and local community and clinical partners.  I think we all left inspired by the progress that has been made despite immense headwinds, and motivated to continue to do more.
• Our 2024 educational series has launched with quarterly webinars and monthly office hours. These offerings are open to all, and if you haven’t yet had the chance I encourage you to check them out!  I particularly want to highlight the office hours, where you can have the unique opportunity to dialogue with the exceptional child psychiatrists on our PHN team.  Those who have attended have found the discussions incredibly rich and useful.  Our next office hours is coming up on June 5^th – for more information or to register, please visit Behavioral Health Initiative – Pediatric Health Network.
• Our Quality Improvement Learning Collaborative has launched! It was a very competitive process with five practices selected to participate out of 16 applicants.  This diverse group of participating practices is working together to improve their ability to provide integrated behavioral health care in their offices. We are also working on developing tools, trainings and other opportunities for all our PHN practices, and—given the great interest—hope to repeat the learning collaborative in the future.

I write this to you from the lobby of the convention center in Toronto, at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting – we are only halfway through the meeting, and already I have seen a number of presentations highly relevant to our work, and many ideas I’m bringing back on how to further advance quality integrated mental health care within PHN. On behalf of the entire Behavioral Health Initiative team, we look forward to our continued collaboration with all of you!