Expanding Our Reach

Kennedy Krieger prepares to roll out KIND, an online program for clinicians and others to learn about neurodevelopmental disorders.

With the current shortage of specialists in neurodevelopmental disorders and pediatric mental healthcare, pediatricians and primary care providers across the country are looking for ways to learn about and manage children with these diagnoses as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

To address this need, experts at Kennedy Krieger Institute have developed evidencebased, online courses that offer just-in-time learning for professionals, including teachers and social workers, as well as for trainees. Called the Kennedy Krieger Instruction in Neurodevelopmental Disorders Curriculum, also known as KIND, it covers 90 topics over nine courses, with about 20 15-to20-minute modules per course, explains neurodevelopmental pediatrician Dr. Mary Leppert, who developed the program with child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Joyce Harrison.

“KIND provides a deep dive into specific topics of neurodevelopmental disorders and the behavioral and mental health conditions that co-occur with them,” Dr. Leppert says. “It’s perfect for addressing the practitioner shortage in these fields.”

Dr. Leppert has been working on KIND for the past decade. She got the idea for it while mentoring trainees at Kennedy Krieger— she wanted them to be able to learn about more than what they could observe in clinical settings.

She and Dr. Harrison collaborated with experts across Kennedy Krieger and Johns Hopkins Medicine to develop the content for the modules, which have been designed in an accessible online format. KIND is currently in a pilot phase, with a general rollout expected in 2024.

“The Institute is a flagship for neurodevelopmental disabilities research, and this takes our collective knowledge outside Kennedy Krieger,” Dr. Leppert says. “This work is an imperative for the Institute— it’s part of our mission to use what we know to help as many children as possible.” – LT

Since 2017, every patient 8 years old or older who comes to Kennedy Krieger Institute for a medical appointment has been asked the same four questions: In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead? Have you felt you or your family would be better off if you were dead? Do you think about killing yourself? Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

Close to 30,000 patients at Kennedy Krieger have been screened for suicide risk with these simple but critical questions. Just under 8% have answered “yes” to one or more of the questions. Of them, 2.5% have been referred to acute psychiatric care.

Screening patients for thoughts of suicide is important because many children and teens with intellectual or neurodevelopmental disorders are at an increased risk for having suicidal thoughts and behaviors, says Dr. Paul Lipkin, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician with the Institute’s Center for Development and Learning.

Kennedy Krieger began screening patients in response to a growing awareness that the nation’s children and teens were increasingly experiencing suicidal thoughts. “Hospitals were starting to screen for suicidality, and we believed we could serve our outpatients in a similar way,” Dr. Lipkin explains.

The questions were developed by the National Institute of Mental Health, with which Kennedy Krieger has collaborated on this effort. For patients answering “yes” to any of the questions, a clinician performs a suicide safety assessment, and the patient’s care team develops an appropriate mental healthcare plan.