Effectively Supporting Youth with Chronic Illness in Schools: External Partnerships and Training Recommendations.

Across Western countries, approximately 15% to 20% of school-aged children and adolescents have a health-related disorder, with incidence rates of childhood chronic health conditions (CHCs) increasing. This contribution comprehensively reviews disease-level, school-level, and systems-level issues related to effectively supporting children with CHCs succeed from both psychosocial and educational perspectives. This article also delineates training needs as they pertain to graduate preparation and/or professional development to equip school personnel to appropriately address students' needs. The article concludes with recommendations for evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies and potential avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration and models of coordinated care for these medically compromised youth.

Integrating Behavioral Health in Primary Care: Lessons from Interdisciplinary Collaboration in School Mental Health.

Integrating behavioral health care into pediatric primary care (PPC) settings can increase access to behavioral health promotion services and treatment. Efficient models for integrated PPC are emerging. Recent reviews call for integrated PPC research to better identify efficient teaming and processes, particularly in areas of building integrated PPC team member capacity and adopting practices that promote "upstream" behavioral wellness specific to community needs. Research in integrating behavioral health in schools has identified key practices relevant to these gaps in integrated primary care (IPC) research. This article discusses possibilities to apply findings from integrated school behavioral health research to IPC settings.

Development and pilot test of criteria defining best practices for organizational sexual assault prevention.

Sexual violence affects millions of Americans, and approximately one out of every three women and one out of every four men have experienced sexual violence during their lifetime. While prevention efforts have focused on implementing specific programmatic approaches, there has been relatively little focus on developing comprehensive and effective approaches to reduce sexual assault prevention across an organization. This study describes the development of the Prevention Evaluation Framework, an assessment targeting organizational best practices for comprehensive sexual assault prevention across multiple domains including human resources, collaborative relationships and infrastructure, use of evidence-informed approaches, quality implementation and continuous evaluation of programs/policies. Using the structured RAND/University of California, Los Angeles appropriateness method to develop the assessment, we conducted a literature review and solicited expert feedback about what a comprehensive organizational approach to sexual assault prevention should entail. We then pilot tested the assessment with 3 United States military service academies; and continued to improve and adapt the assessment to a range of organizations with input from 6 Department of Defense headquarters organizations, and 9 universities across the country. Given the nascent state of the evidence about what makes an effective organizational approach to sexual assault prevention, the assessment reflects one way of promoting quality in this evolving field. The consistency between the experts' ratings and the literature, and the relevance of the items across organizations suggest that the assessment provides important guidance to inform the development of comprehensive organizational approaches to sexual assault prevention and to the evaluation of ongoing efforts.

Student, teacher, and classroom predictors of between-teacher variance of students' teacher-rated behavior.

The current study examined between-teacher variance in teacher ratings of student behavioral and emotional risk to identify student, teacher and classroom characteristics that predict such differences and can be considered in future research and practice. Data were taken from seven elementary schools in one school district implementing universal screening, including 1,241 students rated by 68 teachers. Students were mostly African America (68.5%) with equal gender (female 50.1%) and grade-level distributions. Teachers, mostly White (76.5%) and female (89.7%), completed both a background survey regarding their professional experiences and demographic characteristics and the Behavior Assessment System for Children (Second Edition) Behavioral and Emotional Screening System-Teacher Form for all students in their class, rating an average of 17.69 students each. Extant student data were provided by the district. Analyses followed multilevel linear model stepwise model-building procedures. We detected a significant amount of variance in teachers' ratings of students' behavioral and emotional risk at both student and teacher/classroom levels with student predictors explaining about 39% of student-level variance and teacher/classroom predictors explaining about 20% of between-teacher differences. The final model fit the data (Akaike information criterion = 8,687.709; pseudo-R2 = 0.544) significantly better than the null model (Akaike information criterion = 9,457.160). Significant predictors included student gender, race ethnicity, academic performance and disciplinary incidents, teacher gender, student-teacher gender interaction, teacher professional development in behavior screening, and classroom academic performance. Future research and practice should interpret teacher-rated universal screening of students' behavioral and emotional risk with consideration of the between-teacher variance unrelated to student behavior detected. (PsycINFO Database Record

Engaging youth in bullying prevention through community-based participatory research.

Few studies that engage youth in community-based participatory research (CBPR) focus on issues of safety/violence, include elementary school-aged youth, or quantitatively assess outcomes of the CBPR process. This article expands understanding of CBPR with youth by describing and evaluating the outcomes of a project that engaged fifth-grade students at 3 schools in bullying-focused CBPR. Results suggest that the project was associated with decreases in fear of bullying and increases in peer and teacher intervention to stop bullying. We conclude with implications for the engagement of elementary school-aged youth in CBPR to address bullying and other youth issues.

Advances in bridging research and practice: introduction to the second special issue on the interactive system framework for dissemination and implementation.

The need for new ways to bridge the gap between research and practice is clear; the use of evidence-based prevention programs and implementation with fidelity in practice are strikingly limited. The Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation (ISF) was created to help bridge research and practice by specifying the systems and processes required to support dissemination and implementation of evidence-based programs, processes, practices, and policies. The ISF identifies three key systems necessary for this process which include the Synthesis and Translation System, the Support System, and the Delivery System. The ISF was featured in a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychology in 2008. This special issue extends that work by including both researchers who have applied an ISF lens to aspects of their current work and researchers who have proactively applied the ISF in a process that goes across the various systems of the ISF, i.e., Synthesis and Translation, Support, and Delivery. Content areas include: children's mental health, teen pregnancy prevention, HIV prevention, violence prevention, heart disease and stroke prevention, breast cancer prevention, and substance abuse prevention. In this introductory article, we provide a brief description of the history of the ISF and a summary of the articles in the special issue.

Ready, willing, and able: developing a support system to promote implementation of school-based prevention programs.

While the number and scope of evidence-based health, education, and mental health services continues to grow, the movement of these practices into schools and other practice settings remains a complex and haphazard process. The purpose of this paper is to describe and present initial support for a prevention support system designed to promote high-quality implementation of whole school prevention initiatives in elementary and middle schools. The function and strategies of a school-based prevention support system are discussed, including key structures and activities undertaken to identify, select, and provide technical assistance to school personnel. Data collected over a 5 year period are presented, including evidence of successful implementation support for 5 different evidence-based programs implemented with fidelity at 12 schools and preliminary evidence of goal attainment. Findings suggest the ongoing collection of information related to organizational readiness assists in the adoption and implementation of effective practices and initiatives and provide valuable insight into the development of results-oriented approaches to prevention service delivery. Problems, progress, and lessons learned through this process are discussed to frame future research and action steps for this school-based prevention support system.

Research and action for bridging science and practice in prevention.

There is a well-known gap between science and practice. To address this gap in the areas of Child Maltreatment (CM) and Youth Violence (Y/V), the Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) embarked on a Dissemination/Implementation (D/I) planning project. The project was aimed at identifying better ways to connect research and practice through reviews of the literature as well as through discussions with experts on violence prevention and research utilization. This introductory article sets the stage for the rest of the special issue by defining terms, providing a rationale for the planning project, describing the planning process, and summarizing what is to come in the rest of the issue.

Unpacking prevention capacity: an intersection of research-to-practice models and community-centered models.

Capacity is a complex construct that lacks definitional clarity. Little has been done to define capacity, explicate components of capacity, or explore the development of capacity in prevention. This article represents an attempt to operationalize capacity and distinguish among types and levels of capacity as they relate to dissemination and implementation through the use of a taxonomy of capacity. The development of the taxonomy was informed by the capacity literature from two divergent models in the field: research-to-practice (RTP) models and community-centered (CC) models. While these models differ in perspective and focus, both emphasize the importance of capacity to the dissemination and sustainability of prevention innovations. Based on the review of the literature, the taxonomy differentiates the concepts of capacity among two dimensions: level (individual, organizational, and community levels) and type (general capacity and innovation-specific capacity). The proposed taxonomy can aid in understanding the concept of capacity and developing methods to support the implementation and sustainability of prevention efforts in novel settings.

Bridging science and practice in violence prevention: addressing ten key challenges.

This article illustrates ideas for bridging science and practice generated during the Division of Violence Prevention's (DVP) dissemination/implementation planning process. The difficulty of moving what is known about what works into broader use is near universal, and this planning process pushed us to look beyond the common explanations (e.g., providers were resistant/unwilling to change practice) and think about the multiple layers and systems involved. As part of this planning process, the Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation (ISF) was developed and then applied to the fields of child maltreatment and youth violence prevention. Challenges for each of the three systems in the ISF are discussed as well as and action and research ideas to address the challenges. Also described are actions taken by DVP in response to the planning process to illustrate how a funder can use the ISF to bridge science and practice.

Bridging the gap between prevention research and practice: the interactive systems framework for dissemination and implementation.

If we keep on doing what we have been doing, we are going to keep on getting what we have been getting. Concerns about the gap between science and practice are longstanding. There is a need for new approaches to supplement the existing approaches of research to practice models and the evolving community-centered models for bridging this gap. In this article, we present the Interactive Systems Framework for Dissemination and Implementation (ISF) that uses aspects of research to practice models and of community-centered models. The framework presents three systems: the Prevention Synthesis and Translation System (which distills information about innovations and translates it into user-friendly formats); the Prevention Support System (which provides training, technical assistance or other support to users in the field); and the Prevention Delivery System (which implements innovations in the world of practice). The framework is intended to be used by different types of stakeholders (e.g., funders, practitioners, researchers) who can use it to see prevention not only through the lens of their own needs and perspectives, but also as a way to better understand the needs of other stakeholders and systems. It provides a heuristic for understanding the needs, barriers, and resources of the different systems, as well as a structure for summarizing existing research and for illuminating priority areas for new research and action.

Stakeholders' perspectives on the recommendations of the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to understand stakeholder perspectives on school mental health and the mental health system as they relate to the goals identified by the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. METHODS: A total of 11 focus groups were held in Maryland, Ohio, and New Mexico with groups of parents, youths, school- and community-based providers and staff, and child and school mental health advocates and leaders. Across the three sites, 105 individuals participated in the focus groups. RESULTS: The stakeholders provided several important recommendations to advance the field of mental health. They included addressing stigma, implementing culturally competent care, providing mental health training to school staff, and increasing collaboration between community providers. CONCLUSIONS: Obtaining the views of key stakeholders is critical to transforming the mental health system and expanding the focus on mental health in schools.

Changes in Placement among Children in Foster Care: A Longitudinal Study of Child and Case Influences.

Using Cox regression modeling, this longitudinal study examines child and case characteristics associated with changes in placement among 5,909 Rhode Island children in foster care. Results suggest that half of all children experience at least one placement change while in care. Infants change placements least, and risk increases with child age. Emergency shelter settings have the highest risk of placement change, followed by nonrelative settings, group home settings, and relative foster care. The reasons for removal from the home and the history of previous placements also predict placement changes, as do the interactions between foster care setting and some child characteristics.