Children’s Wisconsin gets $15M gift
Children’s Wisconsin has received a pledge of $15 million, the largest gift in its history, from an anonymous donor to help fund its five-year plan to improve access to behavioral health care for children and adolescents.
The plan, announced in November, is projected to cost $150 million and includes an array of initiatives, such as doubling the number of professionals who provide behavioral health care within the Children’s system.
The pledge is a challenge gift and will match other contributions to Children’s for the plan.
“The community recognizes that mental and behavioral health services must be improved, particularly for kids,” Peggy Troy, president and CEO of Children’s, said in a statement. “We are incredibly thankful to all the donors who have stepped forward for this critical initiative.”
Previous gifts to support the initiatives include $5 million from Kohl’s, $1 million from the Boldt Co. and $1 million from Rexnord Foundation.
Other sources of funding will include revenue from providing behavioral health care to children and adolescents covered by commercial health plans and BadgerCare Plus, the state’s largest Medicaid program; state and federal grants; contracts to provide services; and direct investments by Children’s.
The plan’s goals also include earlier detection of behavioral health conditions and reducing the stigma around mental illness.
Among the initiatives are:
❚ Expanding screening for depression and anxiety among children and adolescents.
❚ Expanding programs for very young children with behavioral health conditions.
❚ Expanding school-based programs. (Children’s now has therapists who provide behavioral health care in about 47 schools.)
“We are not going to fix everything,” Troy said in November. “But we are going to fix a lot.”
Examples of behavioral health conditions that affect children and adolescents include anxiety, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and suicidal ideation.
They also include oppositional defiant disorder, in which a child is defiant and hostile toward other children, parents and teachers, and reactive attachment disorder, in which an infant or young child doesn’t form an emotional bond with his or her parents or other caretakers.
Children’s also has the goal of providing behavioral health care in all or most of its primary care and specialty care clinics.
In the next five years, the health system, which employed 137 psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurse practitioners and therapists in November, hopes to:
❚ Hire 50 additional therapists. It employed 70 therapists in November.
❚ Train 20 therapists in its program that will pay them while they work toward becoming licensed.
❚ Hire 18 psychiatrists or psychiatric nurse practitioners. It employed 12 child and adolescent psychiatrists and two psychiatric nurse practitioners in November.
❚ Hire 25 health psychologists, who help patients during an illness or recovery. It employed 41 psychologists in November. (Psychologists have doctorates. Therapists have master’s degrees, typically in social work or clinical psychology.)
❚ Expand its fellowship program for child and adolescent psychiatrists by eight slots, up from eight now. (Physicians who want to specialize in child and adolescent psychiatry complete a three-year residency in general psychiatry and a two-year fellowship.)