This article was originally published in Rhode Island Current.
A coalition of social and health service providers wants to remap the labyrinth of seven different agencies spread across state government that offer children’s behavioral health services.
The 42 organizations that make up the Rhode Island Coalition for Children and Families called for a new cabinet-level state department to oversee children’s behavioral health in a report released Thursday at an event in Providence.
“Kids’ behavioral health is not akin to adult behavioral health,” Benedict F. Lessing Jr., the CEO of Community Care Alliance, said of the findings in the coalition’s 22-page report titled “Children in Crisis Can’t Wait: The Case for System Transformation.”
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“We know that kids suffer in terms of behavioral health concerns from infancy through adolescence.”
The proposed cabinet would be similar to the Office of Healthy Aging , said Tanja Kubas-Meyer, the coalition’s executive director. Technically a division within a department, the aging office reports directly to the governor like a cabinet position — a model preferable to what the new report calls “too-often disjointed access to care for children and their families.”