KU School of Medicine-Wichita

24 Kari Harris, M.D., associate professor Pediatrics foundations and individual donors. "This is all folks saying this is important," Karlsson said. Karlsson, who joined the faculty two years ago, headed the national accreditation process, which was successfully completed in February. In addition to funding, one requirement was the addition of faculty to supervise the fellows. Ciccolari Micaldi, who completed her residency at KU Wichita before completing her CAP fellowship on the Kansas City campus, returned to join the faculty in 2019. The last requirement was a sucient number of patients, of which Brown said, "We have plenty." Aiming high The medical school has two more collaborative projects underway to increase access to mental health services for children and adolescents. This winter, pediatric residents based at Wesley started receiving additional training in mental health care under a program spearheaded by Harris and funded with a $2.48 million Primary Care Training and Enhancement – Residency Training in Mental Health and Behavioral Health grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The program, Addressing Youth Mental and Behavioral Health Illnesses (AYM HI), will engage psychiatry department faculty to work alongside pediatricians and other specialists to provide training in areas such as interviewing and diagnosing young patients. Harris, an associate professor, said adolescence has always been a tough time mentally for some youngsters and the pandemic made things worse. clinical experience with increased autonomy over time. They always have a supervisor and we're there to support their growth as a physician." It also means many more children and adolescents can be treated. Each fellow will see about 500 patients a year, and the program could eventually contain as many as eight fellows at a time. "It's set up to make a really significant impact and increase access immediately when they start," Karlsson said. The CAPs-in-training will see patients in a variety of settings, including Ascension Via Christi, Wesley Medical Center and the school's psychiatry clinic. They will also work with young patients in school and juvenile law enforcement settings. Karlsson, the fellowship's program director, was previously in the same position with the Indiana University School of Medicine. Raised on a farm near Harper, Kansas, she had contacted Brown about returning to her native state. "It's a fairly complicated thing to get the whole thing organized," Brown said. "When she sent me an email saying, 'I'm interested in coming back to Kansas,' I said, 'We need you.'" Brown noted that the fellowship program had been in the planning stages before her own arrival five years ago. It's being funded by what Brown called a "wonderful collaborative eort" that includes the Patterson Family Foundation, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, Sedgwick County, the city of Wichita, and other private In May, Ciccolari Micaldi made a presentation about KSKidsMAP to the Pediatric Academics Societies meeting in Washington, D.C. Her talk focused on a survey of 25 primary care physicians and clinicians enrolled in the program. "The gist was, they like the program," she said of the physicians. But they also wish their patients could have better access to mental health care including more access to specialist care. "We're working on that," Ciccolari Micaldi said. Brown, Karlsson and Ciccolari Micaldi spend about 1 1/2 days per week on KSKidsMAP, which was funded through a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment that is scheduled to run out in September. KDHE and KU Wichita are applying for a renewal of the grant. 'A really significant impact' KU Wichita started its two-year fellowship program to train psychiatrists in the subspecialty of child and adolescent psychiatry in July. Previously, the state's only CAP fellowship was run out of the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City. Each fellowship cohort will consist of two to four psychiatrists who've already completed three years of post-medical school training in psychiatry. The inaugural class consists of three physicians. Two are current members of the school's psychiatry department and one is from outside the state. For the fellows, Brown said, "The point of the fellowship is that it is progressive

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