Mental Health Care Support

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Care Solace fills a massive gap in our district mental health services for students, staff, and families. It offers 24/7/365 multilingual support for families to get connected to mental health services, regardless of insurance. Care Solace acts as a ‘care concierge’: a Care Companion quickly and confidentially finds available mental health and substance use providers matched to their specific needs. Care Solace can connect students, staff, and families to therapy, couples/family counseling, psychiatry, intensive outpatient programs, partial hospitalization programs, and residential/inpatient programs. The Care Companion seeks out providers with availability and keeps the client updated via text or email along the way. They offer the client at least two provider options and will even assist in scheduling the appointment.

The Care Companion touches base after the appointment about the satisfaction with the provider match. If the provider isn’t a good match, they will continue their search. Without Care Solace’s service of acting as a ‘care concierge’, often families give up their search on finding a provider that has availability to see them. Making all those calls on your own is exhausting and frustrating. Families have voice and choice in the type of help they need from Care Solace.

AUSD student services coordinator Jodi McCarthy on CareSolace:

"Families have been really grateful for the support that Care Solace offers.  Staff have also really been thankful that they are able to make a warm handoff to ensure that students and families are supported...Education funding is not stable and AEF is a partner that keeps students and families in the center of everything that they do.  I can’t express enough gratitude to AEF for helping with the heavy lift of mental health support!"

Key Figures from CareSolace for the 2023-2024 School Year

Care Solace offers a special dashboard for administrators that gives real time data on our use of the service. AUSD can easily see the impact Care Solace is having for our families.

For the 23-24 school year there were:

• 1,072 Inbound interactions
• 7,245 Communications saved
• 77 Warm Handoffs (all referrals from school staff)
• 17 Family initiated cases (families who contacted Care Solace and solicited help from a Care Companion)
• 57 anonymous searches for providers (families searched the Care Solace database on their own and did not request a Care Companion)
• 34 Total appointments into care. Care Solace only counts appointments into care for families that confirm their appointment and want to continue with the therapist. What typically happens is that a family will not get back to Care Solace once the appointment has been made because they believe that they don’t need to… they got the service they were looking for.

Demographics (from 2023-24):

• Adolescents: 45%
• Children: 36%
• Adults: 19%
• Female: 56%
• Male: 41%
• Non-binary: 3%
• White/Caucasian: 53%
• Other: 15%
• Asian/Pacific Islander: 13%
• Hispanic/Latino: 8%
• Black/African American: 6%
• Native American/American Indian: 1%

Care Solace Utilization Data Terms:

• Inbound Interactions: All in-bound phone calls, emails, video-chats, and text messages from community members
• Communication Saved: All outbound calls, emails, and texts by Care Concierge as they work to set up an appointment for a community member in need. This is mostly calls to providers verifying their availability.
• New Cases & Warm Hand-offs: All referrals from school staff via Warm Hand-off, as well as any community member who contacted us directly and requested full concierge assistance into care.
• Family-initiated Cases: Total number of community members who contacted Care Solace directly for an appointment.
• Anonymous Searches: This is a measure of all completed searches by community members through your proprietary link.
• Total Appointments Into Care: Confirmed appointments in which we spoke to the community member the day after their initial appointment and they confirmed they went. This number is often low since community members do not always respond to calls after we help them set up their initial appointment.