Advocacy Driving Access to Pediatric Mental Health Services

The Cincinnati Children’s model of integrating a dedicated mental and behavioral health focus into its government relations work is gaining national attention.

Recently, leaders from Cincinnati Children’s presented at the Children’s Hospital Association’s annual leadership conference, outlining how this framework supports the Mental and Behavioral Health Institute in addressing systemic barriers to pediatric mental health access. The approach reflects a deliberate investment: aligning policy expertise directly with clinical teams to improve care delivery across the continuum.

At a time when pediatric mental health needs continue to outpace system capacity, Cincinnati Children’s leaders view advocacy as a core lever for change—not an adjunct to clinical care, but an extension of it.

A Role Designed to Address System Barriers

Three years ago, Cincinnati Children’s Office of Government Relations expanded its team, adding three senior analysts under Vice President of Government Relations Melissa Saladonis. Lisa Amlung was hired specifically to focus on mental and behavioral health—a role she says is uncommon nationally.

From the start, Amlung’s work was embedded in clinical operations. She partnered closely with inpatient social work teams at the College Hill Campus’ William K. Schubert, MD, Mental Health Center, focusing on delayed discharge cases—situations in which patients remain hospitalized after medical clearance due to limited community placement options.

“I work with our Ohio legislators and leaders, and partner with my colleague who focuses on Kentucky policy, so decision-makers understand how capacity and access issues impact us as a children’s hospital,” Amlung says. “We’ve been working closely with state departments of children and youth, developmental disabilities and Medicaid, as well as with county partners, around initiatives that can change the system and, therefore, help our kids.”

The work is intentionally systems-focused. While the effects are felt at the bedside, many of the solutions live outside hospital walls—in policy, reimbursement and cross-system coordination.

Defining a Mental and Behavioral Health Advocacy Agenda

Amlung helps lead the work directed by the Mental and Behavioral Health Advocacy Agenda, which organizes policy priorities into several focus areas. These include:

• Access for youth experiencing delayed discharge
• Crisis care alternatives
• Payer policy, including mental health parity
• Prevention and upstream programming
• Workforce and workforce-adjacent policy

Overall, the agenda emphasizes strengthening community-based care to prevent escalation to crisis services, expanding capacity for high-acuity youth, and improving cross-system collaboration to reduce avoidable hospitalizations.

For clinicians, the implications of this advocacy work are tangible. Policy decisions affect everything from the availability of residential treatment and crisis response services to reimbursement structures that shape care delivery. By aligning advocacy priorities with clinical realities, Cincinnati Children’s aims to translate frontline experience into actionable policy change.

Responding to the Youth Mental Health Crisis

Although the youth mental health crisis gained widespread attention in 2020, Amlung notes that many of the underlying challenges predate the pandemic by at least a decade.

“A lot of this advocacy work doesn’t naturally happen within hospital walls,” she says. “There are issues, like system capacity issues, that people don’t always associate with a children’s hospital, but they directly affect our patients.”

Cincinnati Children’s leaders see their role as extending beyond care delivery—using data, partnerships and policy expertise to identify barriers to help lead solutions at the state and national levels.

Expanding Advocacy Through Employee Engagement

One area of early momentum is the pilot launch of the Cincinnati Children’s Grassroots Advocacy Center, powered by the Quorum platform. Once fully operational, the tool will allow employees to engage directly with their elected officials on issues affecting pediatric mental and behavioral health through grassroots campaign activities.

“At Cincinnati Children’s, we have more than 19,000 employees with incredible expertise and passion,” Amlung says. “We hope to eventually use this platform to give all of them a voice in the grassroots advocacy space that allows us to harness that collective knowledge in a meaningful way to advance our organizational priorities.”

(Published March 2026)

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