Elaine Gabovitch & Madi Wachman — CARES for Kids / CCATER Overview
(bright music) My name is Elaine Gabovitch and I direct the division for Children and Youth with Special Health Needs at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. My name's Madi Wachman. I am the Director of Parent, Child, and Family Policy at MassHealth.
So Madi, how would you describe CARES for Kids?
Madi
CARES for Kids, which stands for Coordinating Aligned Relationship-Based Enhanced Support is a care coordination service for kids with medical complexity. The goal of CARES for Kids is to support kids and families in their care coordination needs across health, educational, social service, state agency, systems, and to really provide one-stop,
single-source, family-centered, equity-focused coordination. And we're really excited about this new service and we hope that it can fill a gap in supporting kids and families who have more robust needs in care coordination. What is CCATER?
Elaine
CCATER is one of our programs at the Department of Public Health that it stands for Care Coordination, Assistance Training, Education and Resource Center. We are here to help CARES for Kids providers meet their programmatic regulatory goals as a provider for training and competencies. CCATER also provides tailored technical assistance to
CARES for Kids providers. And so these are things like coaching, mentorship, one-to-one problem solving with a peer that's done this work based on decades of their experience.
And in addition, CCATER will also offer a community of practice across provider organizations to learn from one another. And this is all offered at no cost to providers. The reason why this partnership is so great and that it's happening is that for many years we've been working very closely together, really caring about children with medical complexity and their family members, and we've looked at a whole variety of topics. But one topic in particular is that the system is not built for this group of kids and their families. And so
together, I think we've been problem solving how to make that happen and CARES for Kids is leading in that and we're here to support those efforts.
Madi
We, at MassHealth feel so lucky to be partnered with this Division of Children and Youth with Special Health Needs because we really rely on your expertise and experience as we develop this policy. This is a new arena for us. Providing a service for kids with clinical complexity and having this relationship has allowed us to more thoughtfully develop a policy that reflects the needs of families that you have for so long served.
(bright music)