"They're really explaining things in a way that we can understand": A qualitative study examining facilitators of trust in pediatric collaborative care.

University and health clinic professionals employed community engaged research to identify facilitators of and barriers to trust in a community clinic's collaborative care pediatric adolescent psychiatry consultation conference model. The clinic operates as a federally qualified health center medical home offering integrated behavioral health and medical care for all ages and serving majority low-income Latine families. Fourteen parents and six patients ages 9 to 17 were interviewed qualitatively about their experiences participating in the interdisciplinary conference model. Thematic analysis identified patient and parent perceptions of trust toward the collaborative care process, the clinic's health care providers, and the consulting psychiatrist. Results found that facilitators of trust included the primary care provider serving as a bridge to help trusting relationships form between the consulting psychiatrist and families, reciprocal respect between clinic providers and families, and the psychiatrist taking an educational/rapport-building approach. Barriers to trust included the lack of available, quality Spanish interpreter services and lack of a tailored approach for patients depending on diagnosis. Other factors such as parent-child synchrony and optimism contributed to overall reactions to the psychiatry conference model as well as retention processes. In summary, our study elucidates how to implement community engaged qualitative research and contributes information on parent and youth acceptability of collaborative psychiatric care within a medical home. Study results can be used to enhance mental health access for an underresourced population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).