BUILD Health Aurora

ABOUT

The Aurora BUILD Health Challenge responds to psychosocial, developmental, and family well-being needs identified through screenings and interventions delivered in community settings. The partnership creates a continuum of early childhood mental health supports delivered in a local WIC office, primary care clinics, and other community settings to address the upstream needs of families with young children and enhance social emotional well-being. Community Health Workers (CHW) and early childhood mental health specialists collaborate to identify family needs and provide resources for prevention, health promotion, and interventions. The partnership is focused on developing and implementing the necessary agency, community, and systems-level changes to provide a continuum of care.

Targeted Impact

The goal of this collaborative is to improve life-long mental and physical health outcomes for Aurora’s children and families. We identify and meet their needs by providing a continuum of services spanning prevention, health promotion, screening, and intervention in alignment to the BUILD objectives and strategies within the broader system of care.

BUILD PRINCIPLES

BUILD and its communities apply bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven (BUILD) approaches to improve health in communities that are adversely affected by upstream factors.

Bold

BUILD Aurora delivers healthcare and care coordination in non-traditional, community-identified settings where families with young children already are. Collaboration among partners and agencies expand the capacity of community service entities to identify and meet family needs. Our Young Children’s Mental Health Coalition allows us to continue our efforts to develop strategies and activities related to legislative, regulatory, and ACC Phase II policies.

Upstream

We provide upstream support to individual families via a population health approach. This program will strengthen individual knowledge and skills, promote community education by working with early childhood mental health programs, educate community providers and partners about the importance of psychosocial screening and early childhood mental health, change organizational practices, and work toward policy change that influence early childhood well-being.

Integrated

By creating a shared vision, a leadership team, and a project structure, this collaborative is breaking down systems-level barriers to accessing care. Access to screenings and supports address the upstream issues that impact behavioral health in Aurora. Rather than asking stakeholders to come to us, we bring BUILD Health Aurora to the many collaborative efforts related to early childhood mental health in our immediate community and across the State.

Local

BUILD Aurora serves families within the context of their community. More than 100 community members gave ideas on how to improve behavioral health outcomes for young children. Because of this local perspective, Community Health Workers and early childhood mental health specialists are placed directly in a WIC office and primary clinics are resourced with early childhood mental health specialists. Moreover, the CHWs were hired from the impacted community.

Data-Driven

BUILD Aurora collected data through interviews and focus groups with community members living in the target geographic area. They also utilized census tract demographic and health outcomes data to better understand the socio-economic issues impacting certain neighborhoods in the target area. Throughout the project, the team continuously identifies process and outcome data to be collected through qualitative and quantitative methods to improve the pilot and potentially expand to other locations. Impact is being assessed at the individual child and family level, the community partner level, and the system of care in which we are embedded.