Appropriate Access to Residential Services for Children and Youth with Behavioral Health Needs: Recommendations

This work is a continuation of the Commission’s examination of appropriate access to residential treatment services for Medicaid-enrolled youth. Staff presented a draft chapter with policy recommendations developed from the Commission’s analytic work and discussions on appropriate access to residential behavioral health treatment services for children with Medicaid coverage. The draft chapter provided an overview of Medicaid coverage for residential treatment services; challenges that families, providers, and states experience in identifying facilities with the capability and capacity to treat beneficiaries; the lack of publicly available data on the use and users of residential treatment services; and difficulty beneficiaries experience in returning to the community post-discharge. The Commission makes policy recommendations that target these issues and address the absence of easily accessible, public information on facility and bed availability; the availability of data on use of residential care, in particular in out-of-state facilities; and strengthening discharge planning requirements, including for youth in out-of-state residential treatment.