Children’s Blended Case Management Program (BCM)
The St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center Blended Case Management Program (BCM) is designed to provide
seriously emotionally disturbed children and their families with case management services. It has been
recognized that children and youth with serious emotional disturbances need a coordinated, flexible system
of supports and services including mental health, special education, vocational services, medical
and heath care, recreation and social services. In a community-based system of care, these services
are typically provided by a multiplicity of public and non-profit entities organized under several
systems that are often large, bureaucratic, under-funded, and difficult to gain access to and/or negotiate.
The Blended Case Management Program plays a major role by linking clients with needed services in the community;
advocating for clients; helping families negotiate complex systems such as special education, social services,
and mental health systems, and doing on-site crisis intervention and skills teaching.
The BCM Program focuses on the most seriously emotionally disturbed children and adolescents who have been
identified as needing certain services, but are not currently receiving them, or receive them in a fragmented,
ineffective manner. The target populations include children and adolescents between five to seventeen and a half years old, who: (1) are on Residential
Treatment Facility (RTF) waiting lists; (2) have had extended stays in acute and long-term inpatient psychiatric units;
or (3) who are presently on an acute or long-term inpatient unit. It is these children who are at the highest
risk of either pending or continued institutional placement that present the priority target population.
Additional populations served by the BCM program include non-institutionalized youth in the community who have
been inappropriately served by the mental health and other systems such as school, foster care, and juvenile
justice facilities. These youngsters frequently bounce back and forth between systems without any significant
change in their circumstances. The BCM program plays a vital role in linking them with the appropriate services
and assuring that the intervention is appropriate to the client needs.
The BCM case manager is assigned to an individual child; however the BCM works extensively with the family unit
(biological, surrogate, and extended). Knowledge and access to community resources (both traditional and grass roots)
are in keeping with the philosophy of a client-centered approach. To serve, the BCM literally takes the service to
the client. Thus the service is offered in client’s homes, work sites, schools, community centers, recreational
facilities, hospitals, court, and so on.
The BCM case manager is encouraged to aggressively advocate for the needed services and appropriate entitlements.
The overall goal is to provide the client with the necessary tools for negotiating complex systems. Thus the BCM case
manager serves as a role model for the client and family by teaching the child and family about service system and
how to use it most effectively.
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