The Ins and Outs of Providing Emotionally Safe Care to Behavioral Health Patients - 2024 Child Life Conference

Lauren Licata, BS, CCLS is a Certified Child Life Specialist II at Children's Mercy hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. Lauren has worked in a variety of settings during her 10 years as a child life specialist; inpatient, critical care, behavioral health, emergency department, and most recently as a weekend option employee, providing services to the whole hospital. The flexibility of this role has allowed Lauren to gain experience with the behavioral health population during more acute and long-term hospitalizations, including working with the hospital wide behavioral health team to implement care plans, procedures and policies to focus on these patient's psychosocial needs. Lauren also currently serves as co-chair of the department's Comfort Specialty Committee and helped roll out the hospital-wide Comfort Promise initiative by doing staff presentations and educational trainings throughout the Children's Mercy campuses. Lauren is passionate about providing emotionally safe care to all patients and families and continues to advocate for practices that reflect this level of care.

Alex Martin, MS, CCLS, is a certified child life specialist at Children's Mercy Hospital. Alex has been a child life specialist for over 10 years and has worked in inpatient areas, outpatient clinics, the emergency department, the child abuse clinic, and with the behavioral health population. She is currently the Parent Support Program Coordinator in the Kreamer Resource Center for families where she works with the team to create programming for parents and provide support and resources to caregivers with children in the hospital. In this role, she is also a secondary handler to one of the hospital's facility dogs and can offer facility dog visits and events as a method of support to families. She previously was the child life behavioral health program coordinator where she started the behavioral health program to provide consistent child life services to behavioral health patients admitted to the hospital. This included working with the hospital wide behavioral health team to implement care plans and procedures and policies to focus on the psychosocial needs of long term and short term behavioral health patients. Through this role, she was able to focus on emotional safety for this population and create interventions and activities to prioritize emotionally safe care for behavioral health patients.