Thanks for being part of the FIECMH Partner Community!
In this newsletter, you’ll find recommendations for improving family mental health in OC and an invite to our final convening of the year. Do you know others who may want to stay updated? Please share this newsletter!
Join Us!
In-Person Gathering to Celebrate the FIECMH Roadmap and Design our Path Forward: December 5, 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
If you haven’t yet signed up to join us next month, there’s still time!
Together, we will celebrate the incredible work that the OC community has put into setting a vision and approach for supporting the mental health of families with young children over the past two years. We will also launch the next phase of work to address community priorities and make sure this vision is implemented throughout the county.
Please share this invitation widely. The more champions we have for the roadmap, the stronger the network of partners to ensure its progress! We encourage you to bring a colleague or community partner who is new to the project, or who hasn’t been able to join us in person yet.
Refreshments, translation, and childcare assistance will be provided for the event. Please identify your needs on the registration form by November 20.
Roadmap Working Group Update
Solidifying Strategies for Addressing FIECMH Priority Areas
Over the summer, the Roadmap Working Group focused on the highest- priority areas for FIECMH in Orange County:
- Meeting families’ basic needs
- Quicker assessment and connection to services
- Helping parents and caregivers understand child development and behavior
- Increasing access to activities like peer groups and parenting classes
In August and September, the group identified strategies and actions for addressing each priority. From there, they talked about how to ensure the work advances in the coming years. They also looked at what governance, sustainability, and accountability measures are needed to ensure we can put the Roadmap into action.
Through these conversations, five strategies for achieving the priority area goals were identified:
1. Enhance Navigation and Accessibility to Services. Make promotion, prevention, and intervention services and programs more visible, understandable, and reachable for families by removing administrative and practical barriers to engagement and increasing access to navigation services.
2. Increasing Knowledge and Awareness. Share information widely so that families and professionals know about FIECMH and its relationship to child development, parental mental health, and basic needs. Make information and guidance accessible to families. Actively work to increase willingness among families to seek mental health services when needed.
3. Strengthen Capacity at the Organizational and Systems Levels. Families rely on organizations like healthcare providers, schools, childcare centers, and community groups. To respond to family mental health needs, these systems and the people who work in them need the right tools, resources, and support.
4. Empower Informal Networks and Community-Based Initiatives. Support natural helpers in families and communities to foster connection and mental well-being. Those might be neighbors, extended family, or grassroots groups.
5. Create and Sustain a Focused, Reflective, and Responsive System. Build and maintain a system of supports and services that align to the vision and are able to respond as the context and conditions for families evolve.
The working group will continue to refine their recommendations until the roadmap is presented in December. You can sign up to join us at that meeting by using the link in the section above!
Community Resources
New Consensus Study from NASEM on Early Relational Health
In a new report, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) makes recommendations on how early childhood systems can better promote early relational health (ERH) in their communities. ERH is the emotional well-being between parents/caregivers and their infants and toddlers when they have strong, positive, nurturing relationships with one another. These kinds of relationships have a direct impact on FIECMH by supporting healthy child development and acting as a protective factor for children and families experiencing stress. You can read the NASEM report and learn more about ERH by clicking the links below.
Early Relational Health: Building Foundations for Child, Family, and Community Well-Being
Learn More About Early Relational Health
Updated Community Health Worker Resources For Providers—Please Share Widely!
The FIECMH Roadmap recognizes the need for building the FIECMH workforce. Community Health Workers (CHWs) offer a potential avenue for doing this. CHWs work directly with the people in their own communities. Their work can include services like education and mental health support, which they often have lived experience with.
Whether you are new to CHWs or a longtime supporter, this resource from the Public Works Alliance offers a helpful overview. The guide can help providers understand what CHWs do and what kinds of work qualifies for the benefit under Medi-Cal.
Additional information and resources for Community Health Workers are also available from the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), which added CHW services as a Medi-Cal benefit starting July 1, 2022.
Click the buttons below to learn more, and please share the primer below widely with providers who would like to learn about integrating CHWs into their practices and programs!
Community Health Workers: A Primer
In Case You Missed It: Looking Closely at Mental Health Service Delivery in California
In 2024, the California Children’s Trust released a report about California’s divided method of providing mental healthcare in the state—and the challenges it creates for children and young people seeking care. Since 2014, Medi-Cal mental health services have been delivered through two different systems: county-run plans and managed care plans. According to the report, this division makes it difficult for children and their families to access mental healthcare. Some of the recommendations made in the report mirror what we’ve been hearing from the OC community since the beginning of the FIECMH project, such as:
- Centering children and caregivers
- Co-creating public campaigns with families to increase awareness of available supports
- Expanding the workforce in a culturally concordant way
- Ensuring inter-system collaboration and coordination
- Increasing rates for community health workers
To see more of their recommendations, click the link below for the full report.
Difficult Bi-Design: The Promises and Possibilities of California’s Bifurcated Mental Health System
FIECMH stands for Family, Infant, and Early Childhood Mental Health. The OC FIECMH Initiative is focused on infants and children (and their caregivers) because the roots of lifelong mental health—and health and well-being more broadly—start at birth (or before). For everyone to be as healthy and well as possible, emphasizing early, proactive, and protective support versus reactive treatment is key.
The initiative’s work is to envision what a “continuum of care” (the full range of supports for mental health and well-being) looks like for Orange County families. Our goal is to work together to create a roadmap for how we do this, and make sure that the continuum of care envisioned by families, community partners, and systems leaders is realized and sustained.
Questions or comments? Please email us: fiecmh@healthplusstudio.com
Please share this newsletter! Forward it to staff you know at Orange County public agencies, community-based organizations, and local advocates serving children and families, as well as healthcare providers and families interested in knowing about and participating in the initiative.
The FIECMH Initiative is supported by funding from First 5 Orange County and OC Health Care Agency.