Blueprint For Adolescent And Young Adult Health Care

This NYHealth-funded blueprint by the Mount Sinai Hospital serves as a model for delivering high-quality care to teens and young adults.

Adolescents account for more than 20% of New York State’s population. The behavioral patterns established during adolescence, a crucial developmental period, will determine young people’s current health status and their risk for developing chronic diseases later in life. Several public health and social problems either peak or start during these years—smoking, sexually transmitted infections, and teen pregnancies—and the financial costs of these preventable health problems are high. Best practices for meeting the needs of young people and preventing the downward spiral of poor behavioral choices have emerged in recent years, including the nationally-recognized program at the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center.

NYHealth awarded Mount Sinai Hospital a grant to identify and catalogue these best practices that have contributed to its successful approach with adolescents in need of a broad array of primary care services. The blueprint that lays out the necessary elements of a successful approach to meeting the health and behavioral health needs of adolescents. It is meant to be a “how-to” manual for clinical practitioners and health policy leaders to help them design programs that will engage young people and improve their health and wellness.