Importance, Quality, and Engagement: School Mental Health Providers' Perceptions Regarding Within-District Transition Care Coordination Practices

Although care coordination (CC; i.e., the organization of care activities between professionals to facilitate appropriate service delivery; McDonald et al., 2007) has yet to be studied extensively within schools, preliminary research suggests coordinating school mental health supports can be beneficial (Francis et al., 2021) and that interprofessional and interagency collaboration is warranted to meet student needs (McClain et al., 2022). We examined the perceptions of school mental health providers (SMHPs) regarding importance, quality, and engagement with within-district transition CC practices within a multitiered system of support framework. Participants were 163 SMHPs who endorsed being involved in designing, providing, or implementing mental health services in a U.S. school district. The three scales used to measure engagement with CC practices were based on the Care Coordination Measures Atlas (McDonald et al., 2014) and were found to have promising preliminary psychometrics. Descriptive statistics indicated SMHPs endorsed CC as very important but perceived school and district personnel to view it as less important, reported their own quality of CC was slightly above that of their school and district, and regularly engaged in broad CC practices. Moreover, bivariate correlations indicated SMHP's personal views of CC importance were not associated with the quality of school and district CC, yet engagement in broad CC activities was associated with transition facilitation practices, and attitudes about CC were associated with engagement in broad CC activities. Implications of findings are discussed. Impact and Implications Findings highlight that school mental health providers view mental health care coordination as important for ensuring the continuity of school mental health services as students transition schools. Although providers do not perceive their schools and districts share their perceptions/attitudes, obtaining school- and district-level support for mental health care coordination activities is important so that providers do not shoulder responsibilities alone and can engage in more collaborative practices.