CARE Strategies

Wellbeing Services

Worldwide, there have been calls for the development of strengths that promote and protect mental health. Wellbeing services promote activity, creativity, nourishment, growth, connection, meaning, purpose, rest, and rejuvenation.

Wellbeing services are an evidence-based approach to preventing and improving mental health challenges. For example, interventions that build social connectedness among parents improve child mental health status.  As a prevention approach or an add-on to specialty care, wellbeing services ensure clients receive mental health care that affirms the multifaceted nature of mental health. The CARE project is focused on developing a Medicaid-reimbursable pathway for wellbeing services that align with national mental health policy priorities related to payment, clinical model innovation, workforce expansion (with a focus on enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging), quality, and accountability.

Wellbeing services can include:

• Traditional spiritual and cultural practices such as drumming circles and mindfulness groups;
• Youth activities that promote creativity, inclusion and self-reflection such as theatre, hip hop, and sports with socioemotional integration; and
• Information and support groups aimed at promoting helpful mindsets and skills like validation and caring listening.

CARE is elevating examples of wellbeing services with children and families the following service areas:

• Teens and Youth: The model program is a music-integrated, group-program focused on building self-reflection, music composition, and emotion regulation skills, developed and run by New Developed Nations. 
• Children (5-13): The model program is a group-based program for parents that reinforces self-compassion and emotional literacy, developed and run by certified peers with the support of Seattle Children’s Hospital psychologists. 
• Perinatal: The model program is a group-based program for pregnant and new moms that focuses on mindfulness and other wellbeing practices, developed by the University of Washington’s Center for Child and Family Well-being in partnership with community doula and perinatal programs.
• Infant Mental Health, Early Childhood (birth-5): This model is evolving with ongoing conversation with the newly forming Learning Collaborative for Relationship Health facilitated by the Washington Chapter of the American Association of Pediatrics.

The CARE team also fielded a statewide survey through the project’s Community Sounding Board and collected more than 100 additional ideas and examples of wellbeing services that are informing long-term planning.

Wellbeing Specialists

CARE recommends supplementing Washington state’s existing mental health workforce with trained Wellbeing Specialists who provide wellbeing services as preventative or as an adjunct to specialty mental health services. Wellbeing Specialists are anticipated to be individuals with lived and cultural expertise, who bring the value of this lived skillset into interactions with diverse communities and clients. The proposed pathway for Wellbeing Specialists recognizes the opportunity to expand community access to wellbeing services through the expansion of these specialists. Existing workforce can become trained to become a Wellbeing Specialist if they have an interest in delivering wellbeing services (e.g., peers, community health workers).

Culturally Responsive Training & Leadership Support

CARE will enlist existing mental health practitioners in building Washington State’s capacity for delivering wellbeing services. We will facilitate the delivery of Cultural Responsivity Training (CRT) within organizations that currently address community mental health. CRT will introduce practitioners to an expanded definition of mental wellbeing that is more interdisciplinary and holistic than prevailing disease-focused definitions. CRT will also supplement practitioner’s previous and ongoing training around diversity by addressing issues of racism and bias specific to the wellbeing field.

CARE’s goal is for CRT-trained practitioners to apply and promote a wellbeing approach in their ongoing work. In particular, practitioners can use their enhanced knowledge to support new wellbeing specialists. Trainees may  directly support wellbeing specialists in a formal management position, or they may play a less formal role by promoting an organizational culture that values and supports wellbeing services.