Hot Report: Status of Mental Health Care Blueprint Recommendations

OLR Report 2013-R-0427 summarizes the status of recommendations from the 2010 mental health care blueprint for Connecticut's children, a report by the joint child mental health task force.

In 2010, the Joint Task Force of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Connecticut Chapter of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry issued a mental health care “blueprint” for Connecticut's children.

This proposal, developed at the state child advocate's request, makes recommendations to improve mental health access and control mental health care costs for children while maintaining health care quality. These recommendations included:

1. creating a regionalized, integrated system of care that includes outpatient mental health and primary care providers, child guidance centers, school- and home-based programs, mobile crisis teams, and partial and inpatient hospitalization programs;
2. increasing resource allocation to pediatric, day care, and school settings for mental health prevention and early detection initiatives;
3. improving timely access to high quality, appropriate intervention; and
4. preserving a centralized, high quality, long term, inpatient treatment center for the entire state at Riverview State Hospital (now the Albert J. Solnit Children's Center South Campus).

In addition, the proposal called for implementing a model similar to the Connecticut Behavioral Health Partnership (BHP), the state's public mental health system, for privately insured children. The BHP contracts with a national managed behavioral health care company, to serve as its administrative services organization. The contractor's payment is tied to performance benchmarks. To fund the change, the proposal recommended establishing a fund using money paid by the state's health insurers. It would replace the money insurers currently pay for mental health care, similar to the insurance assessment levied on certain health insurers to pay for the state's childhood immunization program.

Most of the blueprint's recommendations have not been implemented. Some of those that have been implemented or otherwise addressed by legislation include (1) creating a regional behavioral health consultation and care coordination program for primary care providers, (2) expanding school-based health centers, and (3) maintaining long-term beds at facilities capable of delivering a high level of care, such as therapeutic group homes.

The report describes legislative action that fully or partially implements recommendations in the report. It lists those recommendations (1) that appear not to have been implemented and (2) whose implementation status we are unable to determine.

For more information, read the full report.