Clinician Training To Address Gaps In Care For LGBTQ+, BIPOC Youth

Brightline, a virtual mental health solution designed for families, has partnered with Violet, a company that provides cultural competence training for clinicians, to increase Brightline’s ability to deliver quality care to their users.

Over 140 Brightline mental health providers were invited to Violet’s platform, with 84% completing the benchmarking process.

Through the partnership, Brightline was able to address disparities for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth and increase their capacity of inclusive care by three times and overall inclusivity by 67%.

At launch, only 4% of Brightline providers had a transgender non-conforming (TGNC) benchmark but after the training that increased by five times.

60% of Brightline providers were motivated after Violet’s benchmarking to keep growing with diverse communities.

Mental health challenges disproportionately impact BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and TGNC youth. Transgender and nonbinary youth found their home to be gender-affirming only 33% of the time, according to Violet. And 60% of LGBTQ+ youth who wanted mental health care in the past year were not able to get it.

In fact, 18% of LGBTQ+ Asian American/pacific islander youth felt that their providers do not understand their race or ethnicity, and it’s just 21% for LGBTQ+ Middle Eastern/North African youth.

The partnership came from choosing to create community-oriented care to serve these communities and to fill the gap with a clinical team that set aside training every month for their providers; a total of 900 hours of Violet education.

One Brightline Therapist says, “Even the multiple classes I took during grad school did not cover the vast amount of topics or the specific healthcare concerns Violet addresses.”

Violet claims that Brightline’s provider understanding of TGNC youth went up 483%.