About Us
Vision
Our vision is to make family-centered, dyadic behavioral health promotion and prevention a routine and sustainable standard of pediatric health care in early childhood.
Mission
Our mission is to promote child and family well-being by working collaboratively with publicly insured pediatric primary care settings to develop sustainable early childhood integrated behavioral health services through technical assistance and training.
How We Will Help Make This Happen
We will support the integration of team-based, dyadic behavioral health supports into perinatal and early childhood pediatric visits. By intervening early, we can destigmatize and make behavioral health care more accessible, improve behavioral health outcomes, and promote overall wellness in our children and families. Integrating sustainable, family-centered supports into early pediatric visits is a key factor in transforming pediatric health care in California and eliminating child health disparities created by structural inequities.
Changes in California Now Support This Work
The California Department of Health Care Services now offers new, innovative ways to pay for family-centered, dyadic behavioral health promotion and prevention services in pediatric primary care. Ensuring families receive timely access to these high-quality services requires collaboration from families, healthcare systems, payers, community-based network of care partners, pediatric health advocates, clinicians, educators, government healthcare entities, professional associations, and funders. The Center for Advancing Dyadic Care in Pediatrics provides targeted support to map out, and bridge cross-system and multi-sector efforts to optimize new Medi-Cal benefits in support of child health equity.
Models are Showing Success
Clinical service models that target the relationship between the infant or young child and their caregiver acknowledge that the caregiving relationship is the single most important developmental context for a young child. To ensure positive health and development of young children, the caregiving relationship, which includes the caregiver’s/family’s well-being, must be the target of clinical interventions during early childhood. There is strong research evidence that relationship-based clinical models that target caregiver-child dyads, triads or beyond are effective in promoting positive outcomes across a continuum of care from health promotion and prevention to treatment of complex trauma and adversity. Models are commonly referred to as “relationship-based,” “dyadic,” or two-generational models of care and can include one or more caregivers and other significant individuals in the life of a child.
