Promising Practices Initiative

Personnel

Pauline Jivanjee, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator
Jennifer S. Simpson, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator
Nancy Koroloff, Ph.D., Co-Principal Investigator
María L. G. Gettman, M.S.W., Graduate Research Assistant

In collaboration with Children's Mental Health Services, the Research and Training Center has completed three monographs addressing promising practices in services to children with emotional challenges and their families. The Center for Mental Health Services has to date supported over 15 monographs, written by teams of children's mental health stakeholders, that explore successful practices in providing effective, coordinated care to children with a serious emotional disturbance and their families. The monographs are linked to the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program, a multi-million dollar grant program that supports approximately 50 comprehensive systems of care throughout the United States.

The three monographs by Research and Training Center staff address: Promising practices in family-provider collaboration; Promising practices in early childhood mental health; and Promising practices in respite care. Click the above link for the monograph you wish to view and/or download full text copies of the executive summaries and monographs. Brief descriptions of each monograph are listed below.

Promising Practices in Family-Provider Collaboration, written by Jennifer Simpson, Nancy Koroloff, Barbara Friesen, and Jennifer Gac, is written particularly for communities who are looking for strategies to increase family participation in systems of care and to expand family-provider collaboration.

• PEN-PAL and FACES Projects in North Carolina,
• the K'e Project on the Navajo Nation,
• the Napa County System of Care and the Sonoma County System of Care in California, and
• the East Baltimore Mental Health Partnership in Maryland.
  
  Authors also did telephone interviews with communities in Hawaii, Kansas, Ohio, Vermont, Maine, California, New York, Philadelphia, and Wisconsin.

• What is family-provider collaboration? How does it happen?
• What are the primary challenges to family-provider collaboration?
• How do specific sites approach family-provider collaboration?
• What strategies and practices have sites developed in working towards collaboration?

• Children's Upstream Project, Vermont,
• Community Wraparound Initiative, Illinois,
• Kanfocus and Project Before, Southeastern Kansas,
• Kmiqhitahasultipon Program, Indian Township, Maine, and
  
• Positive Education Program, Cleveland, Ohio.

• the structure of services,
  
• kinds of services offered,
  
• staff development, training, and strategies,
  
• family participation in early childhood mental health,
  
• culture and early childhood mental health,
  
• community and interagency collaboration in early childhood mental health, and
  
• early childhood mental health policy and financing.

• King County, Seattle, Washington;
• Nashville Connection/Tennessee Respite Network, Nashville, Tennessee;
• Project Relief/the Tampa, Hillsborough Integrated Network for Kids, Florida;
• Region III Behavioral Healthcare Network, Nebraska;
  
• With Eagle's Wings, Wind River Reservation, Wyoming.

The Oklahoma Respite Resource Network was also included in the study because of its innovative approach to respite care services. Data were collected through document review, site visits, and in-person and telephone interviews with program managers and administrators, case workers and therapists, respite providers, parents, and youth.

Research questions focused on promising practices related to the following topics:

• the organization and provision of respite care services;
  
• formal and informal respite care for families;
  
• the place of respite care in system of care services;
• funding and payment for respite care;
  
• recruitment and training of respite providers;
  
• cultural and other issues in matching of families and respite providers; and
  
• families' and children's satisfaction with respite services.

Publication of the respite monograph is anticipated in eary summer of 2004.

Latest Updates

Staff at the RTC recently completed work on a report on respite care in connection with the Promising Practices monograph series supported by the Center for Mental Health Services. The monograph describes how six different communities approach respite care services for children with mental health challenges and their families. The recently published monograph on Promising Practices in Early Childhood Mental Health, as well as the earlier monograph on Promising Practices in Family-Provider Collaboration, are available through the RTC publications department. The monographs can also be downloaded from SAMHSA (link below). The Promising Practices in Respite Care presentation, made during the February, 2005 System of Care conference in Dallas, previews main findings and recommendations from RTC’s study of respite care for families whose children have severe emotional or behavioral disorders. The full report will be published soon.