“Cancer Will Make You Bankrupt!”– Stakeholders perspectives on managing health–related social needs in ovarian cancer

Background: Despite the well-established association between health-related social needs and mental health diagnoses, most studies on screening for social needs have been in primary care rather than mental health settings.Given the increasing national and regional focus on implementing social needs screening, including in mental health settings, it is critical to understand practices that can be improved early in these large-scale implementation efforts.Objective: To assess staff experiences and attitudes following an implementation of social needs screens in specialty mental health clinics across New York State, and identify the client, clinic, and county factors associated with perceived benefit overall and for specific social needs.Method: An HRSN screen was implemented in 113 mental health clinics in NYS between 5/2023-1/2024.Following implementation clinics completed a survey on processes used to implement the screen, interventions to address positive screens, and perception of benefit of screening and interventions for adults, and children/families served by the clinic.Results: The proportion of clinics routinely using a social needs screen increased from 16% to 85%.The majority of clinics reported that social needs screening helped identify clients with unmet social needs, interventions implemented to assist those with positive screens were beneficial to clients, and that the information could be used to improve the therapeutic relationship with clients.However, there was variation in perception of benefit of screening and interventions by client level factors (lower for children and their families than for adults), and by type of social need (lowest for housing, and highest for food insecurity), and county level factors (higher benefit in poorer counties).In addition, perception of benefit to clients varied by clinic implementation approach. Conclusion:The results can be used to identify implementation factors that are associated with positive staff appraisals and assess overall implications for promoting health equity.