Caring Counsel

Dr. Carla Allan focuses on supporting kids and families at Phoenix Children’s

By Alison Bailin Batz / Photos by Claudia Johnstone

Dr. Carla Allan knew she wanted to go into medicine from a young age. However, she initially intended to focus on patients with four legs.

“Before graduating high school in 1998, I became a veterinary assistant with the goal of studying veterinary medicine in college,” Allan says. “A funny thing happened while caring for all of those pets; turns out I absolutely loved their two-legged parents. I was a people person.”

Inspired, Allan changed course and began working toward a pre-med degree at Michigan State University, during which time she learned of a research lab in need of assistants. Eager to gain first-hand experience, Allan signed on for the position, which focused on studying families with children that had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “My role was to work with the kids to get their best effort on our tests, so I got to balance fun with keeping them on track,” Allan says. “My time with those kids and their families once again changed the course of my life.”

During her time at the lab, Allan decided to pursue psychology.

“At the time, Florida State University was doing some research to understand why some children with ADHD engage in risky, dangerous behaviors with the goal of prevention,” says Allan, who was accepted into FSU’s post-graduate program in 2003.

Seeing Potential

Once acclimated to Florida, Allan took on a psychology externship at a juvenile prison, providing educational assessments. There, she was stunned to find that many kids could not read effectively even though they were in high school, struggling with dyslexia and other undiagnosed issues.

After the juvenile prison, Allan – still in graduate school – spent time assessing and treating individuals with serious mental illnesses in a psychiatric inpatient hospital.

The sometimes-grim reality of working in the hospital could have hardened Allan’s disposition, allowing her to focus strictly on patients from a scientific perspective. For Allan, however, the role led to a deeper respect for all individuals fighting internal battles. “As a result, I see potential in everyone, even when it is masked by challenges,” said Allan, who next moved on to her internship and fellowship in clinical psychology at Children’s Mercy Kansas City in 2008.

At Children’s Mercy, Allan fell in love with working in a medical setting where young people were gaining access to life-changing medical treatments. Her training would turn into a nearly 13-year career at the hospital, during which time she earned grants to support two major programmatic initiatives.

Allan and her team created the first ADHD clinic at the hospital. In addition, she led the Summer Treatment Program for ADHD, an eight-week summer camp program hosting 50 kids living with ADHD each year. The focus was to combine traditional, recreational camp activities with evidence-based treatments targeting executive functioning skills, social skills, behavioral parent training, and emotion regulation strategies. She would also serve on the ADHD Clinical Practice Guidelines Subcommittee of the American Academy of Pediatrics and was the associate editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings.

Big Next Steps

By 2020, now married to her high school sweetheart and a mother to two children, Allan was ready to take on her biggest medical role to date: a division chief.

Enter Phoenix Children’s. In January 2021, Allan joined Phoenix Children’s as the division chief of psychology and was subsequently awarded the Hagenah Family Endowed Chair, making her the first woman at Phoenix Children’s with an endowed chair position. “The past four years have been transformative at Phoenix Children’s,” Allan says. “We have steadily built an experienced team capable of meeting the community’s needs at the highest level, hiring some of the nation’s top psychologists and clinicians while creating synergies across our entire system to ensure mental and behavioral health services are embedded.”

This means that Phoenix Children’s has pediatric psychologists and mental health therapists who understand both mental and physical health. These providers are embedded throughout the hospital and develop personalized behavioral health treatment plans for kids with chronic pain, cancer, diabetes, and neurological conditions, for example. There are also services for family members dealing with their loved one’s illness or hospitalization.

In addition, in a nod to Allan’s early work at the juvenile prison, she is a member of a research team that has developed dyslexia screeners for primary care physicians to utilize with children as young as 6 for early interventions.

Allan and her colleagues have also developed a suicide prevention program, which includes universal screening and intervention in every specialty clinic across the Phoenix Children’s enterprise. “When kids tell us they’re struggling, our clinicians use telehealth to ‘meet’ them before they leave our clinic, with the option to start follow-up treatment the same day. We’re teaching kids the coping skills they need to last a lifetime,” Allan says.

To date, the program has screened over 93,000 individuals. The tool is in operation across all clinics throughout the Phoenix Children’s health system and part of a larger effort to address the mental health needs of children. “All of these programs and initiatives are part of Phoenix Children’s continued commitment to ‘whole-child’ health, which prioritizes family-centered programs that address the physical, emotional, and social needs of patients and their families,” Allan says.