Key Points - Collaborative care in behavioral health can enhance providers` ability to support student-athlete wellness. - Athletic trainers should integrate behavioral health professionals into athletic medicine to improve interprofessional collaborative practice. - Interprofessional education on roles and responsibilities can help to bridge the gap between athletic trainers and behavioral health providers in terms of mental health services. Abstract Context: Developing effective interprofessional teams is vital to achieving quality care for those dealing with behavioral health concerns. Athletic trainers (ATs) play a vital role, as they are often the first health care providers to interact with student-athletes participating in intercollegiate athletics. However, research regarding how behavioral health providers view the AT`s role on interprofessional behavioral health teams is limited. Objective: To explore behavioral health providers` perceived role of ATs in collaborative behavioral health care. Design: Qualitative study. Setting: Individual interviews. Patients or Other Participants: Nine behavioral health care providers (women = 6, men = 3; age range = 30-59 years, years in clinical practice = 6-25) from National Collegiate Athletic Association Power 5 schools were interviewed. Data Collection and Analysis: Participants were contacted via publicly available information on their university websites. Participants engaged in individual, audio-only interviews using a commercially available teleconferencing platform. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and returned to participants for member checking. A phenomenological approach with inductive coding and multianalyst triangulation was performed to analyze the transcripts for common themes and subthemes. Results: Three themes emerged - (1) provider experience, (2) the AT`s role in behavioral health, and (3) collaboration. Provider experience included subthemes of formal education and interaction with ATs. Subthemes of the AT`s role included care coordination, information gathering, and positive proximity. Subthemes for collaboration included structural collaboration, cultural collaboration, collaboration concerns, and suggestions for ideal collaboration. Conclusions: Collaborative care models can enhance providers` abilities and maximize support of student-athlete wellness. In this study, we demonstrated that behavioral health providers working within a collaborative care model with ATs had overall positive experiences with such collaboration and that clear role delineation and responsibilities helped to foster high-quality patient care.
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