South Shore Child Guidance (SSCGC) proposes to expand its current services through the CCBHC delivery model to serve children, adolescents, and adults with Serious Mental Illness (SMI), Substance Use Disorder (SUD), and/or Co-Occurring Disorders (COO), as well as children and adolescents with Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED). Our population of focus is foreign-born residents with histories of trauma, limited English proficiency, and poverty.
Our project goals and objectives are aligned with the CCBHC's priorities of increasing access, stabilizing individuals in crisis, and providing needed services for those with the most complex mental health (MH) disorders and SUD. Our specific goals include increasing access to culturally competent, trauma-informed outpatient behavioral health (BH) services; improving health monitoring and outcomes; expanding services for individuals with SUD and COO, especially those with trauma histories; and increasing crisis intervention BH services.
We plan to achieve these goals through increasing the availability, timeliness, and quality of our services. Our strategies include expanding our capacity for providing outpatient BH treatments, especially for children, through increasing our clinic and school district-based clinical teams; expanding our crisis intervention services through increasing our service hours for our Mobile Crisis Team; enhancing our clinicians' training in cultural competence, evidence-based, trauma-focused psychotherapies and other evidenced-based practices; providing trauma-informed services for clients with MH, SUD, COO, SED and SMI; initiating BH services for active military personnel and veterans; increasing screening of physical health factors and conditions, such as HIV, hepatitis, and tobacco use, and behavioral health factors and conditions, including post-traumatic stress symptoms and illicit substance use; formalizing our partnerships with Long Island FQHC, Central Nassau Guidance, and other designated collaborating organizations (DCOs); and beginning to utilize a health information exchange with our DCOs to better manage client care transitions.
During years 1 and 2 of the proposed grant, we will serve 2,385 and 3,000 clients respectively; the total number of clients to be served during this project is 5,385. We will measure our success with 10 quality metrics, including increasing the numbers and percentages of our clients who are screened for HIV, viral hepatitis, substance use, and trauma histories; the numbers and percentages of clients who undergo an annual primary care exam; and the numbers of our clinicians who receive certification in evidence-based, trauma-focused therapies.
