O3283: Implementation of an Interdisciplinary Mental Health Curriculum for Pediatric Residents in a School-Based Health Center

Background: The mental health of adolescents is a growing concern in pediatrics, with increasing prevalence of depression and anxiety in the United States (1). In response, the ACGME’s 2025 program requirements for general pediatrics seeks to improve mental health training (2). Additionally, the National State of Emergency of Children’s Mental Health called for implementation of effective models of school-based mental healthcare to help address these concerns (3). Thus, we developed, implemented, and evaluated an interdisciplinary mental health curriculum for pediatric residents rotating through our School Health Initiative (SHI). The goal of the mental health curriculum was to improve the education of our trainees to better capture patients with mental health concerns while facilitating collaboration between the interdisciplinary team.

Methods: Our pediatric residency program rotates 22 third-year residents each academic year for one-month in the SHI, which serves nine public schools serving up to 8,000 enrolled students per year. Our integrated care practice has a full-time lead pediatrician, three psychologists who provide consultation and ongoing psychological services to students, and weekly on-site psychiatric services provided by a pediatric psychiatrist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner.

Our lead pediatrician, psychologists, and psychiatrists worked together to create and deliver didactic content across four weekly sessions. The content included utilization of mental health screeners in well-visits, depression, anxiety, suicidality, and triage of acute concerns - all based on AAP guidelines for primary care providers. The curriculum culminates in a case-conference where the interdisciplinary team discusses the referrals made in terms of patient severity, status, and outcomes.

Voluntary anonymous evaluations are completed by residents to the residency program at the end of their rotations. These were reviewed for feedback on the curriculum.

Results: Since September 2024, we have had 12 residents complete the curriculum. Three anonymous evaluations mentioned SHI and all three highlighted the new curriculum positively.

Since the implementation of the curriculum, 58 referrals have been generated to our mental health team by our residents from September 2024 to March 2025. This is compared to only 29 referrals made from residents in September 2023 to March 2024, while serving the same volume of patients and patient population.

Conclusion: Preliminary data indicates a positive response from residents, as well as an increase in the number of mental health referrals compared to last academic year through implementation of an interdisciplinary mental health curriculum in our school-based health program. Implementation has also increased our collaboration each month within the interdisciplinary team and led to higher detection and referral rates. Future directions include formally collecting pre- and post-data on the perception of the curriculum by the residents, as well as resident confidence in decision making as it relates to mental health concerns, as well collaboration with interdisciplinary care teams in pediatric practice.