Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Tran T. Doan, PhD, MPH (she-her-hers), for being awarded the 2023 Academic Pediatric Association Young Investigator Award (APA YIA) for her project titled, “Pediatrician preferences on the implementation of universal depression screening in adolescents: A discrete choice experiment.” Doan is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Division of General Academic Pediatrics whose primary research focuses on using decision science methods to provide support and resources to adolescents from diverse families as they make personal decisions regarding primary care and mental health services. 
Doan’s deeply seeded commitment to advancing health equity in pediatric care has been informed by her own lived experiences as the eldest child of Vietnam War refugee-immigrants and a first-generation scholar. She is also a scholar-advocate for language and data equity, with a focus on the need for critical approaches to collecting and using disaggregated data in presently marginalized communities, including Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.
The rising mental health crisis among children and adolescents across the US has continued to escalate concerns among pediatricians and other child health professionals. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association declared a national state of emergency in child and adolescent mental health. Universal screening of adolescent patients for major depression has been recommended as part of routine primary care, but it is unclear how to best implement it. Understanding the experiences and preferences of pediatricians in this routine care can help health systems overcome challenges related to the implementation of depression screenings and care management for adolescents.
Doan and her team’s project is designed to help elucidate the key features of a depression screening program that would better support pediatricians to identify depression among teen patients. The goal of this current study is to measure what those preferable screening factors are among pediatricians and what decisions they would make when faced with implementation tradeoffs. Findings from the study may help explain the current low screening rate for depression among teens and will help highlight the need for strategies to promote this type of universal screening by pediatricians.
Doan and her team have already developed and piloted a survey for the project, and gathered early qualitative results as well as cognitive debriefings, but funding is necessary to disseminate the full survey to an adequate sample size of national pediatricians. The grant award from the APA will help to close the gap and support the completion of the research.
“I am incredibly honored and excited to receive this award because it enables me to better support the health and wellbeing of adolescents, an increasingly diverse population with largely unmet mental health needs," Doan has stated, also noting her gratitude to the research participants, her mentors, and funders who have made this ongoing work possible. A highly competitive award, the Young Investigator Awards program is designed to provide significant support to an early career investigator pursuing a long-term career in research and academic medicine. Awards primarily focus on research enhancing the health and well-being of all children, with an emphasis on those most marginalized communities.
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