Seattle Children’s Anxiety & OCD Programs, directed by Kendra Read, PhD, have expanded substantially in the last several years to account for the rising number of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) referrals for youth ages 3-17 years. Dr. Read and her team have implemented a robust cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) program focused on exposures. In the last two years, they redesigned their programs substantially to implement a stepped, measurement-based model of care program to improve service use, access, and efficiency. These programs start with weekly anxiety & OCD group for youth and their parents, and then families step up to higher levels of care (e.g., short-term individual therapy, intensive outpatient therapy) based on response to previous levels of treatment. These efforts have led to an improvement in the efficiency of care, as fewer patients have needed individual therapy and overall patients have enrolled in a shorter course of therapy — allowing for greater clinical resources to be devoted to patients with greater need. 

Additional weekly groups are run to address specific problem areas in the domains of selective mutism (parent and child) and school avoidance (parent only). Additionally, Seattle Children’s continues to implement an intensive outpatient program for OCD for youth 11-17 years of age, directed by Geoffrey Wiegand, PhD. This program provides intensive exposure and response prevention intervention for youth with severe OCD who have previously failed a course of outpatient therapy or are in danger of hospitalization. The OCD IOP is likely to expand in the near future, as programs expand in order to continue to meet the needs of our extended community. Overall, the programs have worked to increase access to and efficiency of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety, including providing access to rare programs that meet important patient needs (e.g., selective mutism group, OCD IOP, school avoidance program).