Improving the Odds for Adolescents

Improving the Odds for Adolescents is a two-year project to improve health outcomes for adolescents – with a special focus on disadvantaged youth – through the strengthening of state policies, including fiscal strategies.

The project’s core goals are to:

• Deepen the knowledge base about how state policies promote or inhibit high quality comprehensive preventive health care and mental health care for disadvantaged youth;
• Identify and support state policymakers who are committed to improving policies to promote preventive health care for disadvantaged youth; and
• Facilitate informed public policy decision-making through dissemination of critical research and relevant practice and policy information.

Through a range of research-based and public information strategies, this project responds to six core challenges, including poor access to health insurance and quality preventive health care; fiscal policies that impede access to care; federal policies that undermine states’ efforts towards comprehensive health care; gaps in information and its dissemination; and the lack of a strategic, data-driven framework across systems and funding agencies to guide the implementation of preventive health care for disadvantaged adolescents.

Specifically, the project:

• Synthesizes knowledge about effective state policies through the development of state and national policy profiles and disseminate this knowledge widely;
• Pilots a collaborative learning strategy and virtual policy-sharing network to strengthen state policy leadership, communication, collaboration, and capacity to promote comprehensive preventive adolescent health; and
• Implements a series of public information strategies to engage the media, disadvantaged youth, and policymakers in a more informed public dialog on adolescent health care.

Among the adolescent health topics considered to be under the umbrella of comprehensive care for adolescents are primary care and mental health, reproductive health, violence and unintentional injury, substance use disorders, and nutrition and obesity.

Improving the Odds in Adolescent Health is funded by a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies.