Behavioral Health Consultation and Liaison Service

The Pediatric Behavioral Health Consultation and Liaison team provides compassionate, expert multidisciplinary care to children and families facing acute or chronic physical illness. Our team includes attending child and adolescent psychiatrists, child and adolescent psychiatry fellows, post-doctoral psychology fellows, pediatric residents, medical students, and a nurse clinician.

Our team works in partnership with your primary inpatient medical team as part of the comprehensive care you and your family deserve by:

• Helping support, guide, and promote adaptive behavior in response to the stresses of illness
• Assessing and managing emotional and physical pain in a developmentally appropriate manner
• Making treatment recommendations including psychopharmacology, when appropriate
• Referring to and coordinating with subspecialty psychologists for therapeutic support, such as cognitive behavioral therapy while inpatient
• Collaborating with your primary medical team in the evaluation and management of a variety of other clinical circumstances such as:
• Emergency evaluations for dangerous/ unsafe behavior
• Management of delirium, catatonia, or other neuropsychiatric phenomena secondary to medical illness or its treatment
• Assisting on differential diagnosis and management of medically unexplained physical symptoms
• Evaluation of at risk populations at new diagnosis of chronic medical illness
• Evaluation for eating or feeding
• Evaluation for patients who have experienced a traumatic event or loss
• Providing coping strategies to help manage anxiety and/or depression related to medical illness
• Promoting treatment adherence
• Behavioral management of pain
• Collaborating on pre-surgical evaluations
• Managing co-morbid psychiatric illness or emotional distress in physically ill patients
• Assisting with disposition planning
• Facilitating communication with families and teams

Referral Requirements

Requests for a behavioral health consultation may be generated by any member of a Children’s Hospital medical or surgical team, including house staff, nursing and social services, as well as by parents or guardians. The child’s attending physician must approve the request for consultation and discuss this consultation with the child and family.