Putting Families First: Navigating Implementation of Family Peer Support in High-Acuity Youth Mental Health Care Settings

There is an ongoing youth mental health crisis in the United States, with an estimated 11.36 to 36.7% of youth experiencing at least one mental health concern in the past year. Youth admissions to inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations have increased in the United States, and emergency department admissions for mental health concerns among youth have increased 51% in the past decade. Parents of youth experiencing a high-acuity mental health crisis are then forced to navigate the complexities of the mental health care system while also experiencing the stress of addressing their child's mental health crisis. This can lead to challenges in parent engagement in treatment and in accessing adequate follow-up care, resulting in re-admissions to high-acuity settings and increased stress for parents.

Family Peer Support (FPS) offers a unique opportunity to meet this need. FPS capitalizes on lived experience to promote parent-provider engagement, build parent confidence and empowerment, and support families in obtaining the information and skills necessary to advocate for their child's care. Despite evidence that FPS has improved outcomes for families, it is rarely implemented in high-acuity youth mental health care settings. This may be driven by such settings historically not recognizing the value of the expertise that comes from lived experience, instead relying solely on and emphasizing clinical credentials. This roundtable, consisting of two evaluation researchers, a hospital administrator, a leader in a national family-run organization, and a family peer support provider, will explore different perspectives of the value of implementing family-driven care in high acuity settings through the use of family peer support.

The roundtable will begin with a discussion of the challenges faced by caregivers when navigating high-acuity care settings and transitions to lower levels of care, and how FPS can help address these challenges, highlighting research and lived experience perspectives. The discussants will then share their views and insights on the successes, challenges, and collaborative solutions encountered during the development and implementation of an FPS program at a high-acuity psychiatric care setting embedded within a children's hospital housed on a medical school campus. This conversation will illustrate lessons learned through presenting preliminary data from program implementation complemented by input from discussants on their experiences and perspectives of the development and implementation processes. The roundtable will then engage the session audience in an in-depth discussion of their own experiences to identify additional strategies for successful implementation of family-driven care in high-acuity clinical settings.