Missoula county systems of care - the missoula county system of care (MCSOC) will serve children, youth, and young adults ages 0 - 21 at risk for or with serious emotional disturbances (SED) or…

Missoula county systems of care - the missoula county system of care (MCSOC) will serve children, youth, and young adults ages 0 - 21 at risk for or with serious emotional disturbances (SED) or serious mental illness (SMI) and their families. We will place an emphasis on children, youth, and young adults with multi-system involvement and in need of crisis stabilization and intensive home and community-based services. Our geographic area is missoula county in montana and incudes a portion of the flathead reservation. MCSOC providers will identify and assess children, youth and young adults and connect them to a fully integrated continuum of coordinated behavioral health services, including crisis stabilization services. These activities align with missoula county's strategic alliance for improved behavioral health's 2024 goals and success measures of developing a coordinated crisis response system for children and youth experiencing a behavioral health crisis and providing increased support services for youth transitioning from restrictive placements. The MCSOC will serve 325 unduplicated children, youth, and young adults over the course of the four-year grant. The MCSOC activities are centered on the following goals (1) increasing coordination between child-serving agencies by establishing a strategic alliance children's sub-committee (SACS) to oversee and sustain the MCSOC, (2) decreasing unnecessary emergency room encounters and inpatient admissions by strengthening and coordinating the behavioral health crisis services continuum for children, youth and young adults, (3) reducing the length of stay in inpatient settings by increasing access to community-based transition services, including culturally relevant crisis stabilization services, intensive home-based services and targeted case management, (4) decreasing the number of youth at risk for or with SED/SMI that are involved in the juvenile justice system by strengthening the partnership between juvenile justice and behavioral health and enhancing school-based behavioral supports, and (5) increasing family and youth engagement and involvement in all levels of the system of care. The MCSOC will complete these goals by hiring a project director to implement all SOC requirements and support the SACS, oversee the SOC expansion, implementation, and sustainability, oversee the needs assessment, and develop a training plan. The project director, evaluators and children's crisis providers will complete a sequential intercept model and a map of the current crisis continuum. Children's crisis providers will develop and adopt formal referral pathways and polices that increase coordination between crisis services for children, youth, and young adults. The SACS and SOC will develop a cross-system approach to deliver crisis stabilization step down services. The MCSOC, youth court, missoula county public schools and school resource officers will develop a formal partnership to develop and oversee a coordinated response to disrupt the school to prison pipeline for youth at risk of or with SED or SMI. The lead family coordinator and a community health worker will be hired and will recruit family members to serve on the strategic alliance peer advisory committee and the SACS. They will work with providers to identify the number of families in leadership roles and peer support roles and develop a plan to build capacity.