The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine and Brownsville Independent School District have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine (TCHATT) program to aid the need for mental health services in the Valley beginning with two Brownsville schools.
“You know, the Valley is really a desert when you talk about mental health-care resources and I think this legislation and, you know, the mission of the medical school, and really our department of psychiatry, is to change that overall,” said Michael Patriarca, executive vice dean for Finance and Administration for the UTRGV School of Medicine.
The technology of telemedicine connects children and adolescents with child psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and providers from the UTRGV School of Medicine “quickly and efficiently” via video call through a secure and private server to ensure patient privacy, according to Dr. Michael Escamilla, a professor and chair for the School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. It allows patients to get consultations within the same day without leaving school, rather than waiting months for a doctor’s appointment.
Lopez Early College High School and Besteiro Middle School were selected for the two-year program.
Asked why these two schools were chosen, Timothy Cuff, assistant superintendent for BISD, replied, “We kind of looked at areas of need in BISD and looked at some of the factors entering into … where we think would be best suited and we looked at the Southmost area.”
The program is scheduled to kick off in August and within a year of that date, branch out to more schools in the region.
“Next school year, our goal is to be in 10 schools across the Valley and then just grow from there,” Patriarca said. “So, we wanna enroll as many schools as we can.”
Some of the program’s services include brief counseling, where psychiatrists set up a few sessions with the students, recommending supplemental mental health services or even getting students hospitalized if necessary.
The program can help alleviate problems with depression, anxiety and decrease harmful outcomes, either to the person themselves or to other people, according to Escamilla. It can also help students in their school performance since many times when a child or adolescent is not doing well in school, it can be because of some mental health issue, such as a trauma or some stressor that they’re dealing with.
Patriarca said the program is important because it offers mental health care to patients at no charge.
“The Valley as a whole is underserved for mental health care, you know, and children are a big part of that,” he said. “So, that’s why it’s so important. This whole program will really serve as a catalyst for changing that in our region. So, we’re excited about that as well.”
The School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry hopes that the patients, parents and school district welcome this program as a catalyst for change and try to mediate against the need for mental health-care resources, Patriarca said.
“I’m really glad this is happening because I just think we’ve had such a shortage in the state of child psychiatry services and I think this is a very exciting development from the state legislature that they saw the need for this and then provided funding for this to happen,” Escamilla said.
He said it is important for children to get to the right person at the right time and the telemedicine program will help bridge that lack of access by providing patients with quick help.
“Without the medical school in the Valley, we wouldn’t have access to the funding and I think that’s a really important point to make because this program will be so important to changing the landscape for child mental health-care resources, and we’re honored and humbled to be a part of it,” Patriarca said.
