Introduction

Pediatric obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) affects up to 4% of youth [1,2,3,4] and leads to significant impairment in academic, social, and family functioning [5]. OCD typically onsets in childhood or adolescence [6]. Without intervention, OCD persists, leading to impaired occupational attainment and poor life satisfaction [7,8,9,10]. Early treatment is key to healthy functioning [11, 12]. Fortunately, psychotherapy options that ameliorate symptoms and reduce impairment exist for youth as young as three [13]. Gold-standard psychotherapy for pediatric OCD is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that emphasizes exposure and response prevention (ERP) [13]. ERP supports youth to gradually face their fears (exposure) and reduce use of avoidance or compulsive behaviors (response prevention) to help youth tolerate distress more effectively. Unfortunately, most youth in need do not receive ERP [14, 15]. ERP is underutilized in routine clinical settings [16] with perhaps the largest research to practice gap compared to other psychotherapies [17,18,19]. Youth from minoritized backgrounds (i.e., individuals holding social identities subjected to systemic oppression and marginalization) are especially at risk for not receiving ERP [20,21,22,23], indicating concerning health inequities. Minoritized youth also are underrepresented in OCD research, lending uncertainty to the generalizability of current protocols [13]. There is an urgent need to improve access to effective ERP for all youth with OCD, with special consideration for minoritized youth. This requires ensuring that ERP is accessible and, when accessed, is responsive to youths’ diverse needs.

Implementation science, or the systematic study of how to support the successful uptake and utilization of evidence-based practices (EBPs), offers tools to understand why inequities in care reception persist [24]. Implementation science highlights the importance of the intersecting ecological factors, or determinants, that influence care delivery [24, 25]. The Health Equity Implementation Framework (HEIF) is one prominent implementation determinant framework that integrates principles of health equity with those of implementation science to ensure that implementation processes work toward equitable treatment access and response [25]. The HEIF comprises the following seven domains posited to influence care: the societal context (broader sociocultural and systemic factors that impact all implementation domains), characteristics of the innovation (ERP), provider factors, client factors, aspects of the clinical encounter (the dynamic between clients and providers during healthcare appointments), inner context (the local implementation setting, such as the clinic context), and the outer context (the broader cultural and regulatory healthcare systems) [25].

We first present an overview of what is known about key determinants to successful implementation of culturally responsive ERP for pediatric OCD, guided by the HEIF, as it relates both to equity in ERP access and treatment response. Although various EBPs exist for OCD, we focus on ERP because it is the most widely supported psychotherapy for OCD, and it is comparably efficacious to leading medications (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors; e.g., [26]). We discuss each HEIF domain independently, although we acknowledge that these domains are interrelated. We then review efforts conducted to date to improve equitable ERP implementation. Finally, we conclude by providing recommendations for future directions to optimize the equitable implementation of ERP.

Determinants of Equitable ERP Implementation

Societal Context

The societal context consists of institutionally or structurally driven factors external to the healthcare system that influence service delivery including economic factors (e.g., funding for mental health care, economic opportunity), physical structures (e.g., availability of public transportation, physical infrastructure), and sociopolitical forces (e.g., structural oppression, institutional discrimination; [25]). For example, institutional discrimination can result in differential access to resources (e.g., housing, labor, and credit markets, education, and healthcare systems; [27]) that reduce access to mental health treatment [28, 29]. Empirical data linking the societal context itself to equitable OCD treatment access and response are scarce; however, they have downstream effects on all other contextual levels [25, 30] and will be described in more detail within each level.

Characteristics of the Innovation

Innovation characteristics posited to influence equitable care delivery within the HEIF include usability, clarity, underlying knowledge sources, degree of fit with existing practices, and evidence for the innovation [25, 31].

How Innovation Characteristics Influence Equitable ERP Access

The usability of ERP has been linked to implementation [32]. Specifically, ERP is a complex psychosocial treatment that requires substantial resources (e.g., time, access to expert consultation) to train and sustain its use. The difficulty of learning and implementing ERP likely contributes to its underutilization in routine practice settings [33]. Indeed, therapists report ERP is difficult to utilize even after intensive training [32]. Furthermore, the clarity of ERP, or the specific tasks a therapist must execute to deliver ERP, were not well delineated until recently; this “black box” nature of which ERP components are most critical to deliver [34] has hindered implementation efforts.

How Innovation Characteristics Influence Equitable ERP Response

ERP was developed and tested primarily within middle to upper income White communities, raising concern about ERP’s knowledge source. Leading protocols rarely systematically consider the cultural and contextual factors known to influence experiences with mental health and services for minoritized youth such as discrimination and poverty related stressors [35,36,37]. This is in part due to factors within the societal context, including institutional discrimination, that lead to underrepresentation of minoritized youth in research. The broader literature suggests culturally responsive care that specifically addresses aspects of culture and context (e.g., racism experiences, acculturation, poverty related stressors) can improve engagement and clinical outcomes for minoritized individuals [38,39,40], but no specific data for pediatric OCD exist.

Provider Factors

Provider, or clinician, factors have been most widely studied. Common determinants highlighted in the HEIF include provider knowledge, attitudes, biases, and cultural factors [25].

How Provider Characteristics Influence Equitable ERP Access

Likely in part due to the complexity of ERP (as described above), many providers lack the specialty training and associated knowledge to competently deliver ERP (e.g., [41, 42]). There is extensive data documenting that clinicians less familiar with ERP express negative beliefs that ERP can be harmful, unethical, or traumatizing, as ERP involves intentionally inducing distress in clients to support their ability to manage anxious feelings [43,44,45]. These negative beliefs are associated with underuse of ERP [41, 46, 47]. There is also growing evidence that many clinicians experience their own anxiety about using ERP with their clients, which persists even after training in ERP and leads them to underuse it or avoid it [47,48,49,50,51].

Relatedly, clinicians may hold misperceptions of with whom it is and is not appropriate to utilize ERP. For example, clinicians report reduced likelihood of using ERP with clients who are under seven, exhibit lower treatment engagement, are perceived to have limited coping skills, or experience family distress [41, 52, 53] despite limited to no empirical evidence suggesting these are contraindications for ERP. In addition, clinicians may undertreat and underdiagnose OCD-related symptoms in youth exposed to potentially traumatic events [54]. Factors within the societal context (e.g., identity-based discrimination) can lead to provider racial biases which may contribute to misdiagnosis of minoritized youth (e.g., [55]) and lack of proper treatment referral; research with adults demonstrates that minoritized adults are less likely to receive ERP for OCD-related symptoms than non-minoritized adults [56].

How Provider Characteristics Influence Equitable ERP Response

Little attention has been paid to how clinician factors inhibit or promote equity in treatment response in pediatric OCD treatment. A recent meta-analysis suggests that clinician level of therapy does not influence outcomes for youth with anxiety more generally [57]. While it has long been proposed that provider–client racial/ethnic match might impact treatment process and response (e.g., [58]), “data *demonstrating* benefits on engagement and *treatment outcomes” are inconclusive, and likely depend more on client preference and clinician’s cultural responsiveness [59,60,61]. However, this is understudied in pediatric OCD.

Client Factors

The HEIF highlights demographic variation (e.g., socioeconomic status, cultural factors), client beliefs and preferences, health literacy, and medical mistrust as key determinants to equitable implementation at the client level [25].

How Client Factors Influence Equitable ERP Access

Several client factors are known to impact ERP access [62, 63]. Importantly, many identified predictors of access stem from societal inequities and disproportionately present among youth of minoritized backgrounds. These inequities often create conditions in which minoritized communities are forced to prioritize basic needs over seeking mental health treatment [27]. For example, greater logistical barriers (e.g., scheduling and transportation problems, high costs associated with treatment) are associated with lower service use [64]. In addition, reduced mental health literacy in the form of low community awareness of how OCD manifests relative to mainstream perceptions of OCD as focused on cleanliness [65,66,67] and greater mistrust in services [64, 68] are known factors that can hinder ERP utilization (although data in youth specifically are more limited). Greater self-stigma is also hypothesized to impede service use as self-stigma related to disclosing obsessions is associated with internalized shame, leading individuals with OCD to conceal their symptoms; although formal data are lacking [69, 70].

How Client Factors Influence Equitable ERP Response

Research on client moderators of ERP outcomes has primarily focused on demographic variables and symptom severity, with inconsistent findings (see [71] for review). Cultural variation in symptom presentation (e.g., increased likelihood of contamination-related OCD symptoms in Black Americans due to fear of adhering to harmful stereotypes) and the extent to which they are recognized may influence the quality of care received, therefore impacting response [21, 64, 72]. In addition, emerging data in adults suggests that experiences of discrimination lead to OCD symptom exacerbation [21, 73]. Pinciotti and colleagues proposed that experiences of marginalization can influence OCD symptom presentation (e.g., individuals experiencing discrimination related to their queer identity may experience sexual orientation themes in obsessional content) that likely require adaptations to ERP to avoid unintentionally stigmatizing their minoritized identities, but data with youth is scant [73, 74].

Clinical Encounter

The clinical encounter refers to client-provider interactions; while not traditionally incorporated in implementation frameworks, this domain was incorporated into the HEIF given key factors within the clinical encounter (e.g., therapeutic alliance) are central to achieving equitable treatment response and access [25].

How the Clinical Encounter Influences Equitable ERP Access

In youth mental health services broadly, initial encounters with clinic staff have been found to influence access to and engagement with care. For example, when clinic staff assessed and proactively addressed potential barriers to treatment (e.g., telephone engagement interventions where clinic staff collaborated with clients to address potential barriers such as lack of transportation, time, and child care, and negative perceptions about services), families were more likely to initiate treatment [75]. Further, once engaged in care, integrating cultural assessments, such as the Cultural Formulation Interview, within an initial session can improve further engagement in care [40]. Less attention has been paid to the effects of factors within the clinical encounter on ERP access specifically.

How the Clinical Encounter Influences Equitable ERP Response

Clinical encounter influences are largely theoretical. Hypothesized determinants to successful treatment response include a strong therapeutic alliance, transparent communication, and shared decision making regarding client diagnoses and treatment [25, 76]. The therapeutic alliance is particularly central to successful OCD treatment due to ERP’s nature, which requires clients to engage in intentionally distressing scenarios. This requires significant trust in the provider [77]. In fact, longitudinal studies suggest that conducting ERP can strengthen the therapeutic alliance in treatment, perhaps because youth experience the potential utility of ERP firsthand and begin to place more trust in the provider’s ability to help them [32, 78, 79]; this can improve treatment response [80, 81].

Extra attention to the alliance and awareness of how to repair alliance ruptures when they occur may be required when considering equitable ERP implementation. Due to societal factors such as structural racism, youth from minoritized backgrounds are more likely to have experienced discrimination by healthcare providers and are at risk for initial mistrust [82, 83]. Clinicians may unintentionally engage in microaggressions (e.g., making assumptions based on cultural identity), which may further impair therapeutic alliance development [82] and worsen treatment outcomes when repairs are not made [84]. One strategy hypothesized to facilitate alliance building is shared decision making, which refers to collaboration between the provider, client, and family to identify target problems and select treatment techniques [85]. Shared decision making can facilitate incorporation of the client and families’ cultural beliefs, preferences, and values into ERP to enhance alliance and improve outcomes [76, 86].

Inner Context

The inner context refers to local and organizational settings in which ERP is implemented. Common determinants include formal and informal leadership support, organizational culture and climate, policies and procedures, and organizational priorities [25].

How the Inner Context Influences Equitable ERP Access

Key inner context determinants examined for ERP delivery include organizational climate and policies and procedures to support implementation. A commonly studied aspect of organizational climate is implementation climate, or the extent to which the organization supports and rewards the implementation and adoption of the intervention (in this case, ERP) for its clinicians [87, 88]. More positive implementation climate in community mental health is associated with more ERP delivery [16]. ERP is also hypothesized to require specific organizational policies, procedures, and cultural aspects in place to facilitate delivery, such as allowing clinicians to go off-site for ERP practices, having time to prepare for ERP sessions, a culture of collaboration with others in the organization, and resources to support ERP [89]. The extent to which clinics have the ability to mitigate effects of societal level barriers (e.g., transportation passes, flexible schedules, culturally diverse representation of clients and staff, gender affirming practices) can also impact client access to care [90], although this is understudied for pediatric OCD. Overall, these and other inner context determinants important for increasing EBP use (e.g., transformational leadership; Aarons et al. [91]) are understudied for ERP.

How the Inner Context Influences Equitable ERP Response

One potential determinant to equitable ERP response is clinical support; strategic supervision practices (e.g., clinician role plays a potential exposure practice with the supervisor and receives feedback) and other implementation supports (e.g., clinical guides for conducting exposures) may lead to higher quality ERP delivery, thus improving equitable response rates [33, 92, 93]. However, research on organizational strategies for improving equitable ERP response remains limited.

Outer Context

The outer context typically refers to the broader systems factors (e.g., structure of the healthcare system, funding policies, regulatory statutes) that influence implementation of EBPs [25].

How the Outer Context Influences Equitable Treatment Access

In the United States, specialty OCD care is concentrated in clinics that largely provide services to those clients who can afford to pay for out-of-pocket treatment [89], likely due in part to societal challenges related to insurance reimbursement and regulations. In contrast, clinicians working in the public system are more likely to work with minoritized youth and are often working in financially stressed settings with poor reimbursement rates that result in high productivity requirements and caseloads [94]. While formal costing of the training and consultation required to gain ERP competency has not yet been done (and remains an important area for future study), training in EBPs is costly [95] and cost-prohibitive to under resourced public mental health settings. Broader workforce issues also likely contribute to inequitable ERP access. Most mental health clinicians hold a master’s degree [96] and are unlikely to receive graduate training in specific EBPs like ERP [97]. Importantly, the mental health workforce is estimated to be over 70% White [98], indicating underrepresentation of those from minoritized backgrounds, an important consideration for ensuring that clients feel represented [99, 100]. Overall, a dearth of trained ERP providers, especially those that accept insurance, creates burden and stress on caregivers of youth with OCD to successfully engage with care; barriers are amplified for families also facing adverse social determinants of health [101].

How the Outer Context Influences Equitable Treatment Response

Systemic barriers and financial pressure contribute to elevated caseloads and high burnout among clinicians in the public sector [102]. High caseloads and billing expectations that result from outer context pressures leave limited time for the session planning [103], that is thought to be required to effectively deliver ERP [16]. While not yet examined for ERP directly, higher clinician burnout is associated with lower use of evidence-based interventions broadly [104]. Thus, we might expect that quality of ERP is at risk of being negatively impacted when delivered in a financially stressed, under-resourced setting relative to a traditional specialty clinic setting.

Efforts to Improve Equitable ERP Implementation

Enhancing Equity in ERP Access

To date, most resources have been directed toward addressing clinician barriers (e.g., anxiety and negative beliefs surrounding exposure) by training clinicians to increase ERP access, with mixed success. While traditional training efforts have reduced negative beliefs about exposure, they have had minimal impact on increasing clinician confidence or intention to use ERP [47, 105, 106]. Enhancing training with more experiential strategies (e.g., encouraging clinicians to do their own exposures to experience the benefit firsthand), client testimonials, directly addressing common misperceptions of exposure, ongoing consultation, and providing clear clinical implementation supports has led to increases in clinician ERP use compared to traditional training [33, 44, 107], although sustainment remains a concern [106]. Using an ERP model in training to support clinicians to overcome their own anxiety about ERP delivery (i.e., recognizing how clinician’s own negative beliefs can trigger avoidance of utilizing exposure practice with their client and then intentionally engaging in the practice exposure during training until they can tolerate the exposure) has also shown promise in early trials [108]. Limitations of training efforts to date include the relatively small number of clinicians targeted, minimal focus on pre-service training, and the lack of attention to organizational factors (e.g., supervision in exposure, clinician caseload capacity; [97, 109].

Beyond training, other emerging efforts to increase ERP access have included team-based (or “task-sharing”) models that train non-licensed providers to implement interventions in the context of pediatric OCD and anxiety to expand workforce capacity [110], co-location of ERP services in non-traditional mental health settings (e.g., schools, primary care) to increase reach to youth who may not attend traditional outpatient services [111, 112], and delivery of ERP via telehealth to improve access for clients who may face logistical barriers to traveling to on-site services or live in an area with few ERP providers [113,114,115,116]. Other efforts aim to circumvent workforce issues by delivering ERP via app-based tools [117]. Overall, there is emerging evidence for these efforts, with the most evidence to date for telehealth services. Limited work focuses specifically on pediatric OCD, and much is still uncertain about how to optimize their effectiveness.

There is a lack of state- and city-supported efforts to improve ERP access at the larger outer context and societal levels. A notable exception is New York, which is engaging in one of the only state-wide, systematic efforts to improve access to ERP [118]. We also are aware of one community-based clinic in Philadelphia that receives an enhanced billing rate for ERP to incentive its use. However, relative to other system-supported EBP implementation efforts, ERP lags behind (e.g., [119,120,121,122]).

Efforts to Enhance Equity in ERP Response

Recent work has aimed to improve ERP quality through provision of structured support tools to guide clinicians to meet benchmarks of ERP delivery with some success [33], but the impact of this on improving equity in treatment response is not yet known. The literature more broadly points to the importance of improving cultural responsiveness of care to improve outcomes. For example, careful attention to culturally normative behavior in diagnostic assessment and incorporating culturally and racially attuned strategies into ERP (e.g., psychoeducation about the impact of racism on symptomatology, extra sessions to build rapport) has been recommended to improve treatment response for minoritized individuals [123, 124]. Critically, while such guidelines exist and are derived from evidence, most have yet to be formally evaluated.

Critical Next Steps for Centering Equity in the Implementation of Pediatric OCD Treatment

Historically, equity has not been centered in pediatric OCD treatment research. There is much work to be done to improve equitable reach of ERP for youth suffering with OCD. The HEIF clearly highlights the complex, multifactorial efforts required to achieve equitable access and treatment outcomes for youth with OCD. Our review suggests that there has been a disproportionate effort to date to improve ERP access by targeting clinicians directly; however, sustained change is unlikely unless policy and structural factors are addressed.

Furthermore, there are clear gaps in the treatment literature as to how to optimize ERP to address unique needs of minoritized youth with OCD. A major tension in the field exists between what treatment practices are empirically tested and those that are theoretically derived but lack formal data to support them. In the absence of empirical data, relying on practice-based evidence will be essential for improving equitable ERP implementation. Such evidence must go beyond simple clinical reasoning and requires systematic assembly of existing data alongside clinical perspectives and the perspectives of those with lived experience to inform clinical recommendations. For example, emerging work by Sanchez and colleagues [125] developed the RESPECT (Revamping Evidence based Supports to Promote Effective Culturally responsive Treatment) Toolkit for Anxiety and OCD by combining insights from a rigorous review of previous treatment research, years of clinical experience working with and training clinicians to work with diverse populations, interviews with clinicians delivering services within specialty and community-based settings, and interviews with diverse clients and caregivers who received ERP in a community setting. Derived from data synthesis, the RESPECT Toolkit makes clinical recommendations for ensuring ERP delivery addresses key interrelated cultural (e.g., beliefs, values, and family norms related to identity) and contextual factors (e.g., the environment, systems, and structures in which youth live) that influence treatment [125].

We make the following recommendations for future research and practice aimed at advancing equitable implementation of ERP for pediatric OCD:

  1. 1.

    Move beyond training individual clinicians in ERP to foster sustainable, organizational support for ERP in the settings where minoritized youth are likely to receive care. One viable, but understudied model is to test the creation of dedicated service lines for OCD treatment within community mental health centers (supported by organizational leaders) that approximate the structure of traditional specialty treatment clinics.

  2. 2.

    Bolster the master’s level mental health workforce’s ability to deliver high-quality ERP. Clinicians early in their training and even undergraduate students can be trained to conduct exposure (e.g., [126, 127]). However, ERP is largely absent in master’s degree curricula. Improving pre-service training of clinicians in ERP holds high potential to impact current ERP underutilization. This could be done through specialized certificate programs adjunctive to traditional master’s degrees, perhaps created in partnership with specialty ERP treatment centers that can host trainees for fieldwork placements. Given workforce inequities, and common discrimination experienced by clinicians of color in their training, intentional efforts are needed to support clinicians from minoritized backgrounds within training programs (e.g., fellowships, culturally responsive environment, mentorship; [100, 128].

  3. 3.

    Advance research on how to optimize task-shifting to increase workforce capacity to deliver ERP. The professional mental health workforce cannot fully meet demand for services. Community health workers can not only increase access to care in low-resourced community settings, but also increase cultural appropriateness of interventions because they are often from and work within the communities they serve [129]. Future research can build on emerging work on task-shifting in pediatric OCD and anxiety [110] by applying similar models of care to community settings serving youth with OCD.

  4. 4.

    Leverage state and federal funds to effectively scale services across the public system. Larger-scale implementation efforts aimed at targeting clinician factors for ERP lag behind those of other leading youth EBPs that have received state and federal funds to support large-scale rollouts across the public health system (e.g., [130, 131]).

  5. 5.

    Systems-level advocacy must work to change the current financial structures for ERP delivery that drive inequities. As long as insurance companies offer uncompetitive reimbursement rates and remain difficult to navigate when processing claims, ERP providers will continue to be driven out of the insurance market to private practice. This exacerbates inequities by making ERP accessible only to those who can afford to pay costly private practitioner rates.

  6. 6.

    Continue research into how to optimize telehealth practices and technology-based treatments to improve reach of ERP to clients impacted by structural and logistic barriers to traditional session attendance. From an equity lens, careful consideration must be paid to costs associated with developed technology to ensure products do not further exacerbate disparities.

  7. 7.

    Efforts to improve access to ERP must be conducted in conjunction with research aimed at improving responsiveness of ERP to youth of minoritized backgrounds. This includes training clinicians to understand how to address and discuss identity-based bias, in addition to their clients’ cultural and contextual factors relevant to care [38, 124]. Particularly for minoritized youth impacted by racism, the potential benefit of integrating manualized interventions for racial socialization [132] into ERP is an important area for future study. More funding and mechanistic work is needed to test clinical recommendations derived from practice-based evidence.

  8. 8.

    Ensure representation of diverse individuals with lived experience of OCD in all aspects of future clinical research, from treatment development to implementation efforts.

Conclusion

All youth who are suffering from OCD should have the ability to access and receive effective ERP, regardless of their sociodemographic background. We are, unfortunately, far from achieving that goal. We argue that addressing systemic drivers of inequity and an intentional and explicit focus on how ERP requires adaptation to address the needs of minoritized youth is essential to overcoming the many barriers that youth with OCD currently face in receiving effective treatment.