Phone-Based Support Shows Promise for Caregivers After Pediatric Mental Health Crises

When a child is discharged from a hospital after a mental health emergency, the crisis does not end at the hospital doors. It often begins there, as families confront a fragmented landscape of waiting lists, insurance barriers, and unfamiliar terminology while trying to secure follow-up care for a young person who may still be at risk. A new study published in Community Mental Health Journal suggests that one of the simplest interventions available—a phone call—can meaningfully bridge that dangerous gap, and that it can do so with remarkably modest resources.

The study, led by Hanae Fujii of the Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, retrospectively evaluated a post-discharge telephone outreach pilot program that was embedded directly into routine clinical care at a children’s hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Between August 2022 and August 2023, a single dedicated social worker, working just ten hours per week, reached out to nearly 1,000 caregivers of children and adolescents who had experienced mental health emergencies across the hospital’s inpatient units, ambulatory clinics, and emergency department. The scale of the program relative to its staffing footprint is one of the most striking findings: a workforce investment of less than a quarter-time position was sufficient to attempt contact with close to a thousand families in a year.

The urgency of such work is difficult to overstate. Emergency department visits for suicide attempts and intentional self-harm among young people have risen sharply nationwide, a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented steep increases in suspected suicide attempts among people aged 12 to 25 during the pandemic period, and suicide and homicide now rank among the leading causes of death for Americans aged 10 to 24. Research following psychiatric hospitalization has shown that timely outpatient mental health services are associated with a reduced risk of death by suicide, making the post-discharge window a critical target for intervention. Yet national studies of pediatric mental health emergency visits consistently find that a substantial fraction of children never receive follow-up care, and revisits to pediatric emergency departments for mental health concerns are common.

Against that backdrop, the Baltimore pilot program set out to answer a deceptively simple operational question: if a hospital systematically calls the caregivers of children after mental health emergencies, can it actually reach them, and does reaching them translate into concrete help? The program’s designers, including social work staff at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, structured the intervention around three primary outcomes: the rate of successful caregiver contact, the establishment of an initial mental health appointment for the child after the emergency visit, and the solicitation of additional assistance—that is, whether the phone contact surfaced needs that the social worker could then address directly.

The results, while revealing the persistent friction between hospitals and families, were encouraging on feasibility. Over the course of one year, the program successfully reached 55 percent of caregivers with only a single follow-up attempt. Among those successfully engaged, 21 percent requested and received additional assistance. These figures demonstrate that even minimal-contact outreach—one phone call, one additional attempt—can engage more than half of a high-risk population and uncover unmet needs in one in five of the families reached.

The program’s multilingual design deserves particular attention. Pediatric mental health emergencies do not strike all communities equally, and prior research has documented intersectional disparities in suicide-related emergency encounters among children and adolescents. Language barriers can compound the already-daunting task of navigating post-discharge care. By conducting outreach across multiple languages, the Baltimore program was able to engage caregivers across demographic groups rather than leaving non-English-speaking families behind—a limitation that has hampered many previous telephone-based interventions. The study’s authors report that the outreach was feasible across these demographic groups using the hospital’s existing clinical infrastructure.

That infrastructure point is central to the study’s significance. Telephone-based follow-up interventions have a substantial evidence base, but one that comes largely from research settings. A landmark randomized controlled study published in BMJ in 2006 found that telephone contact reduced further suicide attempts among patients discharged from an emergency department. Subsequent trials and programs, including interventions in veterans’ health systems and adolescent-specific telephone outreach programs, have shown that structured post-discharge contact can reduce suicidal behavior and improve linkage to care. The ED-SAFE study demonstrated that emergency department-based suicide prevention protocols, including follow-up calls, are both acceptable and effective. The question confronting health systems has never been whether telephone outreach can work under ideal conditions, but whether it can be sustained as part of ordinary clinical operations, without grant-funded staffing or bespoke research infrastructure.

The Johns Hopkins pilot offers a proof of concept that it can. By integrating outreach into routine care and relying on a single social worker embedded within the pediatric social work department, the program avoided the common trap of designing an intervention that succeeds only in idealized form. The ten-hour weekly commitment, spread across a full year and a high patient volume, suggests a staffing model that mid-sized children’s hospitals could realistically adopt. The program also spanned care settings—emergency, inpatient, and ambulatory—rather than being confined to a single department, which allowed the intervention to capture families regardless of where in the hospital their crisis had unfolded.

The study does carry limitations typical of a brief retrospective feasibility report. Because the evaluation was not a randomized trial, it cannot establish that the outreach caused improvements in appointment completion or clinical outcomes; it demonstrates reach and feasibility, not efficacy. A 45 percent contact failure rate, even with a follow-up attempt, also underscores how difficult it remains to connect with families after discharge, and the authors note that the findings identify ongoing caregiver support needs rather than resolving them. The clinical data underlying the analysis come from the Johns Hopkins Health System and are protected for privacy, with access governed by institutional review board protocols—constraints that limit independent verification but are standard for studies of protected health information. The project was funded in part by the Thomas Wilson Foundation.

Still, the policy implications are hard to ignore. The National Strategy for Suicide Prevention emphasizes care transitions as a priority area, and the period immediately following a pediatric mental health emergency is widely recognized as one of elevated risk. Programs like the one described here operate precisely at that chokepoint. If a hospital can reach half of all families with one phone call and one retry, and if one in five of those families flags an unmet need that a social worker can help resolve, then the marginal cost of preventing a care breakdown is measured in hours per week—not in new wings, new technologies, or new reimbursement streams.

The study also reframes the role of caregivers in pediatric suicide prevention. Much of the existing intervention literature targets the young patient directly—safety planning, motivational interviewing, screening instruments such as the Ask Suicide-Screening Questions deployed in emergency departments. But caregivers are the ones who must schedule appointments, negotiate with insurers, supervise medication, and watch for warning signs once the child returns home. Equipping them, or at least connecting them to someone who can help them navigate the system, may be one of the highest-leverage and least expensive points of intervention available.

For now, the Baltimore program stands as a modest but persuasive demonstration: in the aftermath of a child’s mental health crisis, a hospital that picks up the phone can reach most of the families who need it most, and it can do so without building anything new. As youth mental health emergencies continue to climb across the United States, that may be the kind of scalable, low-cost evidence that overburdened health systems have been waiting for.