Ariana Salaiz
Program Manager, WCAAP
WCAAP’s Champions for Youth Steering Committee, an integral component of our Child Health Improvement Partnership (WA-CHIP) has been a critical place for primary care providers, state agencies, school nurses, and school leaders to come together on common strategies to overcome childhood and adolescent vaccine coverage gaps and to work together to increase uptake in the COVID-19 vaccine. The CFY Steering Committee creates one of the only common tables we know of in the state to ensure broad-based cross sector collaboration to increase child and adolescent vaccine coverage – including primary care providers, the Department of Health, Health Care Authority, Public Health – Seattle & King County, Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the School Nurse Organization of Washington.
Along with COVID-19 vaccine and adolescent immunizations efforts, the CFY Steering Committee is working to address children’s behavioral health needs. Earlier this year, a subgroup of this committee, along with other organizations in the state, developed a media campaign to raise awareness about kids mental and behavioral health, and included youth voices and experience. The campaign includes:
- Teen Link: The group collaborated with Teen Link to develop three TikTok ads, leveraging the “Ask an Expert” video style common on the platform. Teen Link observed a spike in calls/connections as a result.
- Parent Map Webinar: On June 15th Start Talking Now: Tackling the Teen Mental Health Crisis, shared information with parents and teens about how COVID-19 is affecting teens’ mental health. It also covered tangible tips and best practices on how to protect and build mental health among teens. Here is a link to watch the webinar recording.
- Pizza Box Top Buy: 144,000 boxes have been distributed across all 39 counties in the state with mental health strategies for youth and families.
- Priority Populations: TV and radio ads ran in multiple languages for a total of 8 weeks supplemented by print ads and digital radio reaching African American, LGBTQ and API audiences.
- Organic social assets and flyers in 17 languages, including Russian, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Ukrainian, Punjabi, Hindi, Romanian, Somali, Tagalog, Arabic, Cambodian (Khmer), Amharic, Japanese, Telugu and Spanish.
Watch Developments for more information on the work our WA-CHIP steering committees and learning collaboratives are doing, including a report on outcomes from our adolescent immunizations learning collaboratives in December.