Between 2016 and 2020, the number of children and adolescents diagnosed with mental health conditions skyrocketed, according to a new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study published in JAMA Pediatrics. The number of children ages 3-17 years diagnosed with anxiety grew by 29 percent and those with depression by 27 percent.
The Washington Post also recently profiled families’ growing struggles to get essential behavioral health care for their children – a situation that was challenging before the pandemic and is now dire.
These articles are just two examples of the increased attention to the heightened demand for pediatric behavioral health care and the imbalance between immense need and limited available resources.
The solutions identified to address the pediatric behavioral health crisis are many and require a long-term investment and commitment. More inpatient beds, psychiatrists and other behavioral health professionals, treatment options, school resources, early identification and intervention all are among the needed policy solutions.
These solutions are essential, but they take time to develop. Children and adolescents in crisis can’t wait.
XFERALL offers hospitals, mental health agencies, school districts, and crisis teams the means to make a difference today.
Working with hospitals and mobile crisis teams in Tennessee, for example, we have seen dramatic reduction in wait times for children and adolescents needing inpatient or crisis stabilization treatment. Among our behavioral health hospital partners, the best median acceptance time for a pediatric patient is 1 hour, 10 minutes – more than 2000 percent faster than the average -- conservatively estimated to be 25 hours.
We achieve these results not by adding new beds or new clinicians. We achieve these results by reducing the time it takes health care providers to identify capacity in the system that does exist. XFERALL helps mobile crisis teams and hospital ED staff more quickly locate available, clinically appropriate beds or other treatment and expedite transfer of their patients.
Our results in Tennessee are dramatic, but they are also replicable across states. In Texas, one local mental health authority saw a 50 percent reduction in the time to place their patients in appropriate care. Hospitals and others using XFERALL consistently see reductions in placement times, with an average reduction in time-to-placement of 86 percent.
These numbers are meaningful, but what is more meaningful is the impact for children, adolescents, and their families who have waited for help for too long and now are in crisis. These individuals no longer have to wait hours, or even days, in acute hospital emergency departments to get the care they need. They can more quickly and more compassionately be placed in the right treatment for their diagnosis and begin to heal.
Schedule a demo to see how XFERALL can easily be implemented in your hospital to help pediatric patients in crisis get the care and treatment they need more quickly.