April Fernando, PhD, is one of the Associate Directors at the Center for Innovation in Population Health (IPH Center). She oversees the Workforce Development team, which provides training for and implementation of the Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM) approach and TCOM tools to different jurisdictions, states, counties, regions, and organizations.
TCOM is a framework for managing systems, organizations, and programs whose mission is to help people change their lives in an important way.
“What I do is help people understand how TCOM tools can help systems better support the people they serve."
Dr. Fernando is a first generation Filipino American and comes from a large extended family in which her parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all work in the medical field. There was always an expectation that she would fall into the family business and become a physician. Instead, she became part of a select group of non-medical professionals – “the misfits of the family” – through her choice to pursue psychology.
“I used to be asked, ‘When are you going to become a real doctor?’”
She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from California School of Professional Psychology/Alliant International University, where she focused on Psychodynamic/Child and Family areas of study. Early in her career, she became involved in training psychologists. She discovered her love of helping others through mentoring and supporting young clinicians, and helping them to connect to the mission driven part of their work.
April was a training director for over 20 years, and she developed a child and adolescent psychology training program that eventually became an APA-accredited internship program dedicated, in part, to preparing psychologists to provide mental health care to foster youth and their families.
Her work with TCOM began when her mental health clinic was seeking a tool that would help them understand the impact of their work. She heard John Lyons, PhD, (now the inaugural Director of the Center for Innovation in Population Health) speaking at a conference and was intrigued by his approach to measurement and understanding change processes. This brief interaction grew to a professional relationship where they implemented several versions of the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS), which is a TCOM tool developed for assessment and treatment planning services in children’s services.
Dr. Fernando also developed a version of the CANS with Dr. Lyons called the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths-Commercially Sexually Exploited (CANS-CSE). The CANS-CSE measures the specific needs and strengths of youth who are commercially sexually exploited (e.g., mental health, risk behaviors, family needs and strength, etc.). The tool is used for assessment and care planning with sexually exploited youth in a variety of jurisdictions in the United States.
Dr. Fernando currently leads a Child Welfare Collaborative, which consists of 10 state child welfare agencies across the United States that have integrated the TCOM approach. This formed as a result of her TCOM implementation work with child welfare agencies. She realized the usefulness of bringing people together in the collaborative who were at various stages of TCOM implementation and hosted the first meeting in 2019 at the annual TCOM Conference. The collaborative now meets quarterly to discuss TCOM implementation issues, share lessons learned, and provide each other with support in using the TCOM tools to improve the lives of children and families in their communities.
“Our tools focus on social determinants of health and the nuances around them.”
Dr. Fernando’s team works with many child welfare systems to find ways to help children and families who may have been abused or neglected. They also help behavioral health systems where children, families, or adults have mental health challenges or mental health needs. Her team at the IPH Center trains and supports professionals on the TCOM tools, which are used in these systems to help understand people’s stories, find the best ways to provide support, and track change over time so that they know when they have met their goals.
“What keeps me going is helping kids, families, and adults grow, change, and live their best lives to their full potential.”
April describes her role now at the University of Kentucky as, “my lucky second career.” She explains that she gets to put all her previous professional experience (clinical experience, training director of psychologists, and her work with kids in foster care) back into a healthcare frame. She sees her work at the Center for Innovation in Population Health as bringing her family's mission of helping others through health care full circle in her career.
The Center for Innovation in Population Health is focused on trying to find innovative ways to help people live healthy productive lives through the Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM) approach. The TCOM approach is about engaging people there trying to support in their own care and using data to let them know their efforts are working.
