"TRAIN THE TRAINERS"

As part of Project TEACH (Training and Education for the Advancement of Children's Health) and the NY Child & Adolescent Psychiatry for Primary Care (NY CAP-PC) project, REACH faculty have successfully trained 5 New York pediatrician-child psychiatry teams to apply the REACH Institute's basic basic-science-guided coaching methods to help an additional 125 primary care practices integrate pediatric mental health care into their primary care settings.

These teams, one each from SUNY Upstate, the University of Rochester, Long Island Jewish/Northshore Hospital System, SUNY Buffalo, and Columbia University, successfully delivered the REACH Institute's 6-month long mini-fellowship in Primary Pediatric Psychopharmacology (PPP), bringing the total number of primary care provider "champions" now trained to 250 practices statewide.  In the first year's group of physicians trained via REACH's scientifically based hands-on coaching methods, participants showed substantial increases in diagnostic and treatment skills in managing common child mental health problems, such as ADHD, depression, and anxiety problems after 6 months.

These successful "train-the-trainers" methods, originally developed by and used almost exclusively only by the REACH Institute, are exceptionally important.  If more widely applied to to other problems such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and congestive heart failure, these scientifically-based physician teaching methods could offer major benefits to improve health care quality nationally.  The success of REACH's train-the-trainers methods are atypical, because effective programs delivered only by university scientists typically fail once others attempt to disseminate the methods, and as they leave the careful oversight of the original developers. In part, this problem explains why US healthcare providers are often 2 decades out-of-date in learning and providing scientifically proven interventions - an urgent science-to-service gap documented by the Institute of Medicine.  Unfortunately, the US healthcare system relies almost exclusively on ineffective CME programs to try to retrain out-of-date doctors.

Since 2005, the REACH Institute has now trained more than 800 physicians in this 6 month long, intensively coached mini-fellowship program.  Results of 28 separate trainings are shown in this graphic figure.  Further train-the-trainer activities are now in planning stages for the province of Alberta, Canada, US-based healthcare installations of the US Army, and the states of Minnesota and Nebraska.  Contact the REACH Institute for additional details on training outcomes and the impact physicians' practices and on the children they treat.

Please contact Peter S. Jensen, MD, at the REACH Institute for more details.  Forthcoming papers on these first findings from the NY TEACH/NY CAP-PC program are in preparation.