Partnering for Success: Implementing a cross-systems collaborative model between behavioral health and child welfare
Section snippets
Background of Partnering for Success model development
To strategically address the challenges associated with ensuring that children and youth in the child welfare system have their mental health-related needs identified and addressed, the National Center for Evidence-Based Practice in Child Welfare (National Center), funded in 2013 by the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, has endeavored to create and deliver two interlaced interventions described and referenced hereafter as
Implementation sites
Thus far, the National Center has implemented PfS in four sites selected through a national request for applications process: Baltimore County Department of Social Services, Maryland; Administration for Children’s Services, Brooklyn, New York; two regions within the Maine Office of Child and Family Services; and Tulsa and surrounding counties as well as 7 other counties within 3 districts, served by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services. The study was approved by the author’s University of
Results
The National Center consolidated data sources to analyze High-Fidelity Performance Indicators in relation to PfS implementation within and across sites. Evaluation activities across the two levels (i.e., Delivery System Partnership & Leadership Performance and Child Welfare & Mental Health Workforce Performance) for the six elements of the HFPI framework are provided in Table 1.
Discussion
Feedback provided by staff and leadership in initial sites proved invaluable to the overall model improvements, which are now institutionalized in the PfS model. This included revision of training content, enhanced continuous quality improvement processes, and extended orientation and engagement activities with staff during the initial installation stages. Although selected sites went through a thorough process of exploration prior to selection, much more work was required during an expanded
Conclusions
Partnering for Success brought together several rapidly evolving fields of practice, including implementation science, common elements of evidence-based practice, high-fidelity coaching, and certification to change practice in four jurisdictions. PfS represents a novel approach to scaling support mechanisms of communication and collaboration between child-serving systems towards a unified goal of improved child mental health outcomes. However, the project highlighted several important
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Richard P. Barth: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Writing - original draft, Writing - review -editing. Leslie J. Rozeff: Conceptualization, Data curation, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, writing - original draft, writing - review -editing. Suzanne E.U. Kerns: Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review -editing. Melinda J. Baldwin:
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgment
Partnering for Success is a program of the National Center for Evidence-Based Practice in Child Welfare which is supported through grant 90CT7001-01-02 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau. Funding support was also provided by the Children’s Bureau through the State of Maryland’s Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration project. The National Center for Evidence-Based Practice in Child Welfare (NCEBPCW) is operated by the
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