Resilience

Regional Teams Enhance Ability of Primary Care Clinicians Throughout Massachusetts to Serve Children and Adolescents With Mental Health Issues

 AHRQ Innovations Exchange,  Massachusetts Department of Mental Health

With funding from the state government, the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Project uses regional teams of mental health professionals to support pediatric primary care clinicians throughout the state in diagnosing and treating patients with mental health issues. The teams provide telephone consultations during visits and, as needed, follow-up, face-to-face consultations with patients.

Read the complete Innovation Profile here.

 

Implementation of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Guidelines with Community-Based Physicians Results in Fewer Hospital Referrals and Improved Outcomes

AHRQ Innovations Exchange, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, March 2010.

Summary

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center created an initiative called the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Collaborative to work with local primary care physicians to standardize their management of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The Collaborative aims to improve patient care and reduce unnecessary hospital referrals by providing physicians with strategies to implement evidence-based guidelines and an established algorithm to identify complicated cases for referral. An assessment of 19 practices found that participating physicians were more likely to adhere to key elements of the evidence-based guidelines and less likely to refer uncomplicated cases to the hospital.

Read the entire Innovation Profile here.

Best Beginning: Partnerships Between Primary Health Care and Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services for Young Children and Their Families

Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development, E.A. Rosman, D.F. Perry, and K.S. Hepburn, 2005.

Summary

Pediatricians are in a unique position to identify early childhood mental health concerns and family mental health and substance abuse risk factors. This SAMHSA, funded, web-based resource features eight innovative medical home practices that integrate behavioral health screening for the whole family, facilitate referrals to community services, and offer follow-up care. This resource describes how the practices use very different approaches to do it, fund it, and the lessons they learned.

Click here to access this report at the GUCCHD web site.

Inter-Agency Collaborative Provides Home Visits, Specialized Support to At-Risk Families, Leading to Better Prenatal Care, Less Child Abuse, and Fewer Early Childhood Deaths

  AHRQ Innovations Exchange, Family Support Collaborative; Sacramento (CA) County Department of Health and Human Services, Birth & Beyond,  March 2010.

Summary

Birth & Beyond is a voluntary program that provides periodic home visits from trained paraprofessionals, including AmeriCorps members, and specialized support services to high-risk families in select Sacramento County neighborhoods. The program facilitates access to prenatal care, health-related evaluations and services, parenting support, and other appropriate support services, with the goal of reducing the risk of poor birth outcomes and child abuse. The program also operates eight Family Resource Centers in the targeted neighborhoods that have high rates of child abuse. The program improves parenting skills, prenatal care, breastfeeding, immunization rates, and employment prospects, and reduces incidence of depression and family violence. These improvements have, in turn, led to less child abuse and fewer early childhood deaths.

Click here to read the complete AHRQ Innovation Profile.

24-Hour Mobile Mental Health Crisis Team Reduces Hospitalization for Children with Complex Behavioral and Emotional Needs

AHRQ Innovations Exchange, Wraparound Milwaukee, Mobile Urgent Treatment Team (MUTT),  March 2010.

Summary

The Mobile Urgent Treatment Team is a multidisciplinary team that provides 24-hour crisis intervention services to families in the Milwaukee area. The Mobile Urgent Treatment Team team defuses crisis situations and helps to find community services for the child and family as an alternative to institutionalization. The program, which is popular among both police and parents, has significantly reduced the need for hospitalization for children and adolescents after a crisis situation.

To read the complete innovation profile, click here.

Community-Wide Collaboration Provides School-Based Mental Health Services to Students and Families in Impoverished, High-Crime, Urban Neighborhoods

AHRQ Innovations Exchange, August 2010.

Summary

Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention, a local child mental health agency, along with the Boston Public Schools and several other urban community service agencies, have joined together to develop Connecting With Care, a school-based, collaborative, community-wide program that provides mental health and other support services to students and their families living in neighborhoods plagued by poverty and crime. Connecting With Care is designed to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in mental health status and treatment by focusing on students (and their families) who are adversely affected by ongoing exposure to trauma. The program has enhanced access to needed mental health services in a population that has limited means of accessing such services. An evaluation of the program's impact is currently in process. 

Click here to read this AHRQ Innovation Profile.

Unclaimed Children Revisited: The Status of Children's Mental Health Policy in the United States

The National Center for Children in Poverty, by Janice L. Cooper, Yumiko Aratani, et al, November 2008.

Executive Summary

Over 25 years ago Jane Knitzer, in the report Unclaimed Children: The Failure of Public Responsibility to Children in Need of Mental Health Services, documented policy and program disconnects that meant children and youth with mental health needs and their families did not get the services they needed.* That report, along with family advocacy, served as a spur to improve service delivery for the most troubled children. In the intervening years, there has also been an explosion of knowledge about the biological and social determinants of children’s mental health issues, new understandings of how children and their problems develop, and new ways of providing preventive and treatment services. And so, more than a quarter of a century later, NCCP posed the central question for today’s children’s mental health system: to what extent is this new knowledge incorporated into the policy and practice frameworks governing children’s mental health?

This report is based on a study that documents how current child mental health policies across the United States respond to the needs of children and youth with mental health problems, those at risk, and their families. Our aim was to identify best policy practices that support family- and youth-focused, researchinformed, developmentally appropriate, culturally and linguistically competent services and supports.  (NCCP)

Click here to read more or download the full report.

Trauma Faced by Children of Military Families

Trauma Faced by Children of Military Families: What Every Policymaker Should Know.   National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, by Fianna Sogomonyan and Janice L. Cooper, May 2010

Abstract:

Active duty military personnel and National Guard and reservists experience multiple deployments as a result of the conflicts that comprise the War on Terror. A large body of research has accumulated on the behavioral health problems faced by military personnel as a result of these conflicts. After nearly a decade of war, a growing area of research shows the negative impact on children, youth and families of U.S. military personnel. Children of military families often experience multiple stressors before and during their parent’s deployment and when they come home. Without appropriate mental health support systems, children of military personnel may be at a significant disadvantage compared with their peers in non-military families.

Promoting the Social-Emotional Wellbeing of Infants and Toddlers in Early Intervention Programs

Promising Strategies in Four Communities, Taniesha A. Woods, Sheila Smith, and Janice L. Cooper, National Center for Children in Poverty, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University,June 2010

This brief presents promising approaches to support the social-emotional wellbeing of infants and toddlers through the Part C Program. The strategies discussed in this brief were identified through case studies carried out in four communities: Boston, Massachusetts; Los Angeles County, California; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and Southeast Kansas. These case studies were part of a larger project designed to show different policy options that states use to support strategies that target social-emotional development as part of a comprehensive approach to early intervention services. Findings from the larger survey are reported in Promoting Social-Emotional Wellbeing in Early Intervention Services: A Fifty State View. As a companion to the survey report, this brief examines exemplary policies and practices that highlight the potential of the Part C Early Intervention Program to play a major role in reducing the risk of long-term social-emotional and behavioral difficulties of vulnerable children.

Read the full article here...

Presenting Telelink Mental Health Services

Providing mental health services via technology -
One in three Canadians live in rural or extremely remote communities. The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is providing a variety of mental health services to pediatric populations and their families using live, interactive, teleconferencing and other technologies. (Aboutkidshealth)