The Washington State Department of Health, Seattle Children’s, and Frontier Behavioral Health are partnering on a new, HRSA-funded initiative to create a crisis care consultation service for northeastern Washington.

The award of $445,000 per year for five years will build on the existing Partnership Access Line (PAL) and Crisis Care Service at Seattle Children’s. PAL provides mental health consultation to pediatric primary care providers statewide. This project will provide additional outreach for PAL to the pediatric primary care providers in the ten counties in the Better Health Together and North Central Accountable Communities of Health, increasing their use of the PAL line. Clinical leads Molly Adrian, PhD, and Eileen Twohy, PhD, will train and support a crisis support team at Frontier Behavioral Health in Spokane based on the Crisis Care Consultation Clinic model at Seattle Children’s. This team will provide a combination of in-person and telehealth crisis support services to clients in the region with suicidality crises and inadequate current supports. The PAL line will be used to triage referrals from PCPs that are appropriate to refer to the Frontier Crisis Support Team. Read More.

Seattle Children’s faculty also secured a grant focused on suicide intervention strategies for teens. Molly Adrian, PhD, and Elizabeth McCauley, PhD, together with Jeff Bridge, David Jobes, Barbara Stanley Greg Brown and Bob Gallop, were awarded an R01 from NIMH titled Advancing Suicide Intervention Strategies for Teens During High Risk Periods (ASSIST). The two-site, three arm randomized trial aims to evaluate two treatments: the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) or Safety Planning Intervention with follow-up (SPI+) compared to usual care. The objective of the grant is to inform the effective management of adolescent suicide risk by evaluating promising treatments and developing the evidence-base for interventions that are well suited for health systems to adopt to help youth transition from acute to outpatient care.