Improving Child and Parent Mental Health in Primary Care: A Cluster-Randomized Trial of Communication Skills Training.

Pediatric primary care providers report a lack of skills and training to treat child mental health problems. Interventions to improve primary care mental health services for children have largely focused on specific disorders. This article reports the outcomes of a brief training program for pediatric primary care providers that sought to improve their communication with families and give them skills to efficiently treat a broad range of mental health problems. Mothers who visited a trained provider had greater reductions in their emotional distress six months later compared with mothers who visited an untrained provider. In addition, the mental health functioning of African American and Hispanic children who visited a trained provider also improved.