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Mental Health Training for Medical Assistants in Pediatric Primary Care

Mental health is a vital component of overall well-being, but many people—especially racial and ethnic minorities—do not receive adequate mental health services. Primary care is an optimal setting to provide mental health services, but primary care physicians often fail to identify and treat mental health problems due to limited time, resources, and barriers related to language and culture.

In response to this problem, researchers from Mathematica and Johns Hopkins University School of public health are piloting a mental health communication skills training for paraprofessional medical assistants at the Mary’s Center for Maternal & Child Care, a federally qualified health center, located in Washington, DC, that primarily serves low-income immigrant Latina women and their children. The training is designed to help medical assistants:

• Talk to mothers and children about their mental health
• Elicit mental health concerns
• Set the agenda for the visit
• Relay information about mental health to the physician
• Engage families in mental health treatment

Mathematica is designing the training and conducting a pre-post evaluation. The evaluation includes collecting data from three cohorts of families recruited from the Mary’s Center to examine changes in families’ perceptions of care, discussion of mental health problems, identification of mental health problems, and engagement in treatment. The evaluation team is conducting focus groups with physicians, medical assistants, nurses, and administrators to examine their perceptions of the training and impact of the training on the clinic and is measuring the uptake of skills among medical assistants by videotaping patient interviews. The findings will help determine whether this model of training reduces racial and ethnic disparities in the delivery of mental health services in primary care.

Related Publication

"Receiving Advice About Child Mental Health From a Primary Care Provider: African American and Hispanic Parent Attitudes" (November 2007)