Prioritizing Workforce Diversity, Prevention, and Equity: The PIPELINE for Youth Health Project

Overview: This presentation describes core components and preliminary outcomes of an innovative workforce development program for advanced-year MSW students. The program, PIPELINE for Youth Health, is designed to create a sustainable pipeline of racially and ethnically diverse behavioral health practitioners equipped with skills in prevention and intervention in interprofessional youth-serving settings.Proposal text: Behavioral health integration (BHI) has the potential to facilitate early identification and expeditious access to evidence-based treatment for youth with behavioral health concerns, as well as address the social determinants of health (SDOH) that drive longstanding racial health disparities (1). BHI within both traditional primary care settings, school-based health centers and schools themselves represents an opportunity to augment existing evidence-based treatments with preventive interventions that emphasize protective factors, enhance social-emotional learning, and assist children and families in developing adaptive coping responses that foster both physiological and psychological health. Given that social workers constitute 40% of the behavioral health workforce (2) the profession is well-positioned to play a critical role in addressing upstream, systemic issues that prevent equitable access to service through prevention; however, current data show that prevention remains a low priority in social work education (3-5). Moreover, the workforce composition remains primarily white (85%) and does not mirror the population it intends to serve (6).

This presentation will describe core components and preliminary outcomes of the Prioritizing Integrated Care, Prevention, and Equity: Leading Interprofessional New York City-based Efforts (PIPELINE) for Youth Health project. Funded through the Behavioral Health Workforce, Education, and Training (BHWET) program offered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) the overarching goal of PIPELINE for Youth Health is to create a sustainable pipeline of racially and ethnically diverse behavioral health practitioners equipped with skills in prevention and intervention that are needed to work with youth across the entire continuum of care and practice effectively in integrated, interprofessional settings. The program directly addresses both the behavioral health workforce shortage and the lack of diversity within it, while simultaneously equipping the emerging workforce with a specialized skillset designed to both prevent and address the adverse impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and other risk factors for behavioral health disorders through the following objectives:

1) Development of a specialized social work curriculum that prioritizes prevention (and intervention) in behavioral health and health equity. We will describe a curriculum grounded in the SDOH that includes evidence-based prevention and intervention, as well as individual and population health monitoring methods used to advance health equity.
2) Creation of mutually beneficial strategic partnerships that address training needs of both students and practicing social workers who have completed their graduate work. We will describe strategies used to build a foundational partnership with the largest public system of health care in the United States.
3) Targeted efforts to diversify an emerging social work workforce that is not only well-equipped to meet the behavioral health needs of youth and their families but is also reflective of communities that are served. We will describe a series of targeted programmatic, recruitment, and retention strategies employed to support students’ enrollment and participation in the program, as well as a supplemental workforce transition component designed to facilitate acquisition and sustainment of gainful employment. Supervisor assessment during the first semester indicated student’s demonstrated both strengths and need to develop competencies(7) in the domains of clinical practice and consultation skills.