The Ohio Healthy Transitions Project (OHTP) will serve youth and young adults in Summit and Medina counties, aged 16 to 25, with serious emotional disturbance (SED), serious mental illness (SMI), or co-occurring mental health and intellectual developmental disabilities (IDD). The multi-system organizations serving the target population in these two counties will collaborate to promote awareness of the unique challenges faced by transitional-aged youth (TAY) with behavioral health and intellectual-developmental disabilities. OHTP will provide culturally competent services including a full continuum of life-skills, vocational, educational, and social-emotional wellness to enable youth to become healthy and productive adults. Specifically, the following Evidence-Based Practices will be expanded: Transition to Independence (TIP), Trauma-Informed Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (TI-CBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention (CBT-SP) and High-Fidelity Wraparound. The key foci of the OHTP will be the following:
a) Improve access to services for TAY by increasing youth and adult system coordination as measured by procedure changes, OHTP Advisory Council performance, streamlined funding, and EHR service data, and improving service capacity as measured by caseload data and procedure guidelines;
b) Increase regional and state awareness of TAY needs for SED/SMI and IDD as measured by social media metrics (number of impressions, etc.), collateral information material distributed, and number of new referrals mentioning social marketing as source, and
c) Increase employment, education, training, and community involvement for target population as measured by discharge records.
Once fully operational, OHTP will serve a total of 350 youth over the lifetime of the project.