National Psychiatric Organizations Put Spotlight on Kaye’s Program

With funding from the New York State Office of Mental Health as part of Project TEACH, Kaye developed the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry for Primary Care (CAP PC) program in 2010. CAP PC provides assistance to primary care providers for their pediatric patients with mild to moderate mental health problems.

“The CAP PC program represents a lifetime of working toward the integration of physical and mental health, which has been in my heart from the beginning of medical school,” says Kaye.

The Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences collaborates on CAP PC with four other university-based child psychiatry divisions — Columbia University Medical Center, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, University of Rochester Medical Center and Upstate Medical University — to provide real-time psychiatric phone consultations for primary care providers and assist with referral linkages.

The program also emphasizes formal education for primary care providers and has been the largest provider of continuing medical education of any child psychiatric access program in the country.

Thus far, the program has provided consultation support for more than 7,000 pediatric patients throughout New York state. Over 2,200 primary care providers have registered for the program, which continues to grow at an annual rate of 15 percent.

In recognition of the program, Kaye accepted the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Psychiatric Services Bronze Achievement Award on Oct. 19 at the APA Institute for Psychiatric Services’ annual meeting in New Orleans. The highly competitive annual award is given to recognize creative models of service delivery and innovative programs for people with mental illness or disabilities.

Less than a week later, Kaye received the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s (AACAP) 2017 Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Service Program Award for Excellence at the group’s 64th annual meeting, which took place Oct. 25 in Washington, D.C.

At the Washington meeting, he gave a presentation titled “Improving Primary Care Access and Quality of Care for Children with Mental Health Needs: The CAP PC Experience.”

“Many primary care providers tell us that mental health issues are their biggest and most common problem,” Kaye says. “The whole goal of CAP PC is to try and help primary care providers develop competence and feel confident about assessing and managing their patients’ mild to moderate mental health issues.”

The AACAP award recognizes innovative programs that address prevention, diagnosis or treatment of mental illnesses in children and adolescents and serve as model programs for the country. The award is shared between the awardee and his or her service program. It was established in 1996 and is supported by the Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Foundation.

Kaye established the school’s training program in child and adolescent psychiatry and served as director of training from 1986-2014, and since that time he has been vice chair for academic affairs in the Department of Psychiatry. A Distinguished Fellow of AACAP and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the APA, he is a past president of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training.

His work has focused on psychiatric education, and he is first author on a book for primary care physicians: “Child and Adolescent Mental Health,” published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins in 2002.

Beth A. Smith, MD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and division chief of child adolescent psychiatry, and Sourav Sengupta, MD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and residency training director in child and adolescent psychiatry, were instrumental in developing the CAP PC program.

Steven L. Dubovsky, MD, professor and chair of psychiatry, Kenneth E. Leonard, PhD, professor of psychiatry and director of the Research Institute on Addictions, and Alex Cogswell, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry, worked with Kaye to create the program.  

The CAP PC program is supported by staff members Ira Bhatia, MS, and Kristin N. Mcginley, LCSW.