By Jennifer Vanore, Ph.D.
In 2019, UniHealth approved a $200,000 grant to the Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health (known as The L.A. Trust: https://www.thelatrust.org/) to develop their Data xChange Project. The goal of the project was to develop a technological infrastructure linking a student’s health status and their school performance in order to identify any correlations. The research took over two years to conduct and the first “report card” has recently been released by L.A. Trust.
You can read the full report here: https://issuu.com/thelatrust/docs/the_la_trust_impact_report_2024?fr=sZTgyYTY0MTU2NDQ
- Here are some of the key findings:
While schools are obviously the primary source of our youth’s future in terms of education, they are also the literal future of our youth in terms of health – last year two-thirds of students had more than two visits to their onsite Wellness Center in a year, which indicates that students rely heavily on school Wellness Centers and clinics for their primary care. Further, students and their families trust these Wellness Centers, which are strategically located to address the greatest student need. - Dental services are provided in about half the clinics or Wellness Centers included in this study. In the past year these locations hosted and average of a nearly 20% increase in dental services. (This increase may have been due to a combination of the backlog in the data from during the pandemic and families not yet feeling comfortable seeking out these services until more recently.)
- One of the starkest data points from the report showed that students who were diagnosed with either anxiety or depression had the highest rates of chronic absenteeism and missed an average of 31 days of school a year. A study based on the data published in the Journal of Adolescent Health last year showed that after a student visits a Wellness Center for mental health reasons, their attendance increases over time. If schools can screen students sooner, and/or enroll them into appropriate services earlier, we have the opportunity to prevent this steep decline in school attendance.
We here at UniHealth operate as a responsive grant-maker, and we look to our partners and stakeholders in the field to help us identify emerging health-related trends. During the pandemic, we realized the deep and urgent need to focus more intensely on the mental health of youth.
This report only further supports the urgency and importance of meeting that need.
While this statement may seem intuitive, to have this data measured and tracked across clinic and school records proves what many teachers, parents, families and friends already know – that we need to listen to, support, engage, and activate our youth. Screenings and diagnoses are incredibly important first steps and our grantmaking will continue to promote early detection and connection to youth mental health care. It also will support some of the recommendations set forth in the Impact Report, such as investing in programs that reduce stigma and raise awareness for youth mental health challenges. Some of our recent grants are aligned with these recommendations and have included funding peer-to-peer interventions, youth leadership and engagement programs, and other innovative mental health therapies ranging from meditative practices, arts therapy, and community gardens.
Having our young people feel seen, heard, and understood is a critical step towards engagement and achieving school success. Generating and deploying this innovative data to better inform our work will serve our youth in years to come. The Los Angeles Children’s Trust recently was awarded a prestigious 5-year grant from the National Institute for Health (NIH), along with UCLA, Kaiser Permanente, and L.A. Care, to continue this research and better inform how we can improve access to mental health services for our youth. While we are still far off from getting an A+ in this work, our grantees are working hard to not just improve their own grades, but the grades for our future.
