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National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention

November 2011

This issue features an interview with Malcolm Gordon, Ph.D., from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, updates from our federal and cross-site evaluation teams, and highlights from the Western States Help Me Grow Summit. It also includes follow-up resources from the Project LAUNCH Summer Institute held in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as our usual listings of new resources and upcoming events.

Grantee News

Help Me Grow Western State Summit Highlights

Several Project LAUNCH grantees are involved with Help Me Grow, a system of early detection and care coordination comprising outreach to children’s health care providers and the larger community; a centralized telephone access point for connecting families to services and care coordination; and data collection to understand all aspects of the system, including identification of gaps in and barriers to programs and services. In October, five Western states—California, Oregon, Washington State, Utah, and Colorado—who are planning or implementing Help Me Grow came together in Portland, Oregon, for a two-day meeting to share information on how Help Me Grow is working within each state, with a focus on implementation, collaborative partnerships, funding, social marketing and communication, and evaluation. For more information about Help Me Grow, visit http://www.helpmegrownational.org/index.php.

Federal Partner Spotlight

Interview with Malcolm Gordon, Ph.D.
Government Project Officer, National Child Traumatic Stress Network

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) is a collaborative network of centers that address the behavioral and biological aspects of psychological trauma. SAMHSA’s mission in this effort is to improve the quality of and increase access to trauma-informed services for all children and families across the nation. In particular, these centers focus on intervention development for programs and agencies serving the children and families in their communities.

The NCTSN comprises three types of centers:

  • The National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, which serves as an overarching coordinating center and helps to bridge the work of intervention specialists with those working directly in the field to ensure that intervention practices effectively respond to the needs of each target community
  • Treatment and Services Adaptation Centers—programs usually located  in  universities  or academic medical institutions  with expertise in intervention development
  • Community Treatment and Services Centers—agencies that work directly with the community to implement trauma-informed care

While Project LAUNCH grantees are charged with using a promotion and prevention approach to support young children and their families, Project LAUNCH services can still apply the work of the NCTSN. The network has provided resources for caregivers and community members that have been shown to be effective in changing adults’ responses to children who exhibit behavioral issues due to stress reactions following trauma. For instance, at one center, education on trauma’s impact on foster children enabled foster parents to respond to the children’s behavior in a more proactive, rather than reactive, way. This subtle change greatly reduced the rate of residential instability for these children, which prevented further behavioral problems. At another site, NCTSN experts trained police officers to effectively work with children who may have been exposed to domestic violence, particularly when mental health providers are not immediately available.

The NCTSN addresses the needs of children and families who have been exposed to traumatic events, and it broadens the understanding of what can be done at the community level to prevent further problems from developing in children following a traumatic event.

The NCTSN offers several relevant resources:

  • The NCTSN Web site, www.nctsn.org, which includes numerous resources on the Products Web page.
  • The NCTSN Center Map, which displays the location of and contact information for each NCTSN center involved in the network. View the map at http://www.nctsn.org/about-us/network-members/map.
  • The Learning Center for Child and Adolescent Trauma, which includes an array of resources on its Web site, including professional development opportunities, archived Webinars, and toolkits for educators and service providers. Visit the Learning Center at http://learn.nctsn.org/.

GPO Corner

 

As part of our effort to be better informed about developments in the fields of substance abuse prevention and treatment, this month Andrea has shared links to two new reports from SAMHSA. In addition, below you will find the link to SAMHSA’s Strategic Plan, Leading Change, which describes the agency’s eight strategic initiatives and the objectives and action steps for each. This document is intended to set the priorities and guide the work of the agency over the next three years.

Within our Project LAUNCH team at SAMHSA, we have also been doing our annual Strategic Plan review, with attention to setting priorities for the coming year. We have four main areas of focus—grantees, partnerships, communication, and evaluation—and are in the process of updating our priorities and defining action steps and leads for each. We look forward to sharing more about our strategic goals in the months ahead, and wish you well as you embark on review of your strategic plans.

Highlights from SAMHSA Reports:

  • Adolescents in general are at high risk for substance use problems. Particularly vulnerable are young mothers (those ages 15 to 19). Substance Use Among Young Mothers, a recent report from SAMHSA’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, uses combined 2005–2009 data and focuses on substance use among young mothers who live with their children.
  • The use of illicit drugs among Americans increased between 2008 and 2010, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by SAMHSA. The survey shows that 22.6 million Americans age 12 or older (8.9 percent of the population) were current illicit drug users. The rate of use in 2010 was similar to the rate in 2009 (8.7 percent) but remained above the 2008 rate (8 percent). The complete survey findings are available on the SAMHSA Web site. 
  • Leading Change: A Plan for SAMHSA’s Roles and Actions 2011–2014introduces eight new Strategic Initiatives that will guide SAMHSA’s work from 2011 through 2014 to help people with mental and substance use disorders and their families to build strong communities, prevent behavioral health problems, and promote better health for all Americans. Download the report.

Cross-Site Evaluation Update

 

The CSE Team will hold monthly Evaluation Learning Community calls starting in November. These calls will provide a time for LAUNCH evaluators to share information about their grantee-specific evaluations, ask questions, and engage in discussions on specific topics. Topics will be determined collaboratively with the evaluators. The first call will be Wednesday, November 16, from 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern Time.

The LAUNCH Technical Assistance Team and the CSE Team have been collaborating on designing an Evaluation Group for the LAUNCH Web site. The Evaluation Group will be a place for housing resources related to the LAUNCH CSE, Special Studies, SAMHSA requirements, and evaluation more generally. It will also be used for posting e-mails to other evaluators in the group, if group members have questions or want to share thoughts or ideas. The group will be available on the Web site in mid-December, and all evaluators will be notified when it is active.

For the last several weeks, LAUNCH grantees have been reporting data on their services and systems development activities in the CSE Web portal. Once all data have been submitted, the CSE Team will review the data and contact the evaluator with any questions. This review process will take approximately three weeks. Each evaluator will then receive Excel spreadsheets with the data they submitted to the portal for all previous reporting periods. Evaluators can use these Excel spreadsheets for their own local-level analyses and reporting.

The CSE Team has been busy with several other data collection activities. CSE liaisons are now scheduling and conducting telephone interviews with cohort 1 and 3 community coordinators, the state project director for cohort 1 grants, and either the state director for maternal and child health or the ECCS director in the four cohort 3 states that do not have a LAUNCH grant (Connecticut, Colorado, Missouri, and Texas). The purpose of these interviews is to learn several things:

  • What programs existed within each LAUNCH strategy area in the community and state when LAUNCH began
  • The key factors in the decision to support (or not support) programs within each strategy with LAUNCH funds
  • The major accomplishments of the community and state wellness councils, including new policies or practices that have been adopted in the LAUNCH community or state as a result of Project LAUNCH
  • Strategies or activities that grantees have taken to sustain services and systems change beyond the grant period

Additionally, the cross-site team will complete the last of the site visits to cohort 2 grantees in November.

The CSE Team would like to thank all LAUNCH grantees for scheduling time for site visits or telephone interviews. The information shared during these data collection activities has been invaluable to the LAUNCH CSE and will be summarized in upcoming evaluation reports.

Upcoming Events

 

Rural Behavioral Health Webinar: "Place Matters":  A Conversation About Rural America and Social Determinants
Wednesday, November 16, 3–4:30 p.m. Eastern Time (2 p.m. Central; 1 p.m. Mountain; 12 noon Pacific)
This webinar will introduce four broad types of rural places, and explore their relationship to social determinants of health, as a way to present useful and practical information that can benefit rural communities working to promote behavioral health equity for children and their families.
Register for this event. Please note that registration closes Tuesday, November 15, at 5:00p.m. Eastern Time.

National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day
Save the Date! Wednesday, May 9, 2012
For more information on Awareness Day, visit http://www.samhsa.gov/children/.

For more event listings, visit our Events Web page.

Follow-Up Resources from the Summer Institute

Working with Schools

Communications

Evaluation

From Lynn Karoly and Rebecca Kilburn’s presentation:

From Tom Schultz’s presentation:

From Laurin Kasehagen’s presentation:

Leadership

Resources from the Leadership Track can be found on the Summer Institute Web page.

Trauma-Informed Care

Other Resources

Supporting Parents with Mental Health Needs Issue Brief
This child welfare issue brief describes a study conducted among community-based system of care sites to learn about efforts to assess parents’ mental health needs, effectively engage and support them, and  improve system coordination and access to services. The brief is intended to inform system reform in child welfare and mental health, as well as child and adult service systems.

Systems of Care Infrastructure Toolkits
These individual toolkits were developed for practitioners and administrators to strengthen infrastructure within grant communities. Family and community members contributed to the development of these resources, which cover strategic planning, governance, system management, coordination of services, communication, policy, finance, continuous quality improvement, and training, development, and human resources.

For more resources, visit the Resources Web page.