The Center for Interventions to Enhance Community Health (CiTECH) announced this year's CiTECH Practice Innovation Awards with the awarding of over $100,000 in funding for 4 practice innovation projects. These projects represent true community-academic partnerships that aim to improve community behavioral health services and outcomes across diverse populations and settings.
Awardees:
1. The CHURCH Project: Congregations as Healers Uniting to Restore Community Health
PIs: Frances Jordan, MEd, MS, Homewood Community Ministries and John M. Wallace, Jr., PhD School of Social Work
Because of issues like stigma, mistrust, absence of insurance, and lack of culturally competent providers, “many African Americans prefer informal church support and rely on religious coping instead of visiting mental health clinics for mental and emotional problems.” Building upon this preference, the CHURCH (Congregations as Healers Uniting to Restore Community Health) Project will incorporate Dissemination and Implementation Science methods (i.e., Intervention Mapping and Implementation Mapping), in a Community-Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) collaboration, to develop, pilot and evaluate a culturally-tailored behavioral health intervention and implementation strategies that can sustain the intervention within the local church context. The goal of the intervention is to increase clergy and congregations’ mental health awareness, knowledge and skills. In turn, they will be able to embed evidence-based mental health practices in their churches, and ultimately, to improve African Americans’ mental health.
2. Stronger Collaboration with Intensive Family Coaching: A Pilot Study
PIs: Douglas Muetzel, BA, Wesley Family Services and Marlo A. Perry, PhD, School of Social Work
Young children in families who come to the attention of the child welfare system often exhibit emotional and behavioral challenges. Additionally, their caregivers often struggle with inappropriate and/or inconsistent discipline strategies. Several evidence-based practices (EBPs) have been shown to be effective at improving both parenting and child behavior outcomes, and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is one such intervention, with a solid research base showing positive results with families who are and who are not involved with child welfare.
However, as with many evidence-based practices, there are significant barriers in connecting families to such services, particularly families who may need them the most. In an effort to reduce this science-to-service gap, Herschell and colleagues developed Intensive Family Coaching (IFC), which is a home-based adaptation of PCIT.
The project aims to improve the outcomes for young children and their caregivers who are involved in the child welfare system through Intensive Family Coaching (IFC) by conducting a pilot study with a small sample of child-welfare involved families. The team will also work to increase access to and uptake of Intensive Family Coaching in the child welfare population.
3. Adapting and Piloting an Evidence-Based Team Training Intervention for Child Advocacy Center Multidisciplinary Teams
PIs: Mikele Bay, Childrenʼs Advocacy Center of McKean County and Elizabeth A. McGuier, PhD, Department of Psychiatry
Children in rural areas are nearly twice as likely as their urban peers to experience maltreatment, resulting in increased risk for mental health problems, academic and vocational impairment, and interpersonal problems. Child maltreatment has substantial long-term costs for children, families, and the systems that serve them. Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) provide multidisciplinary, interagency responses to allegations of child maltreatment and have wide reach into rural areas. Rural CACs often have few staff and rely heavily on multidisciplinary team members employed by independent organizations (e.g., child welfare workers, law enforcement, advocates, mental health providers). In this context, multidisciplinary teams are likely to play a central role in implementation of evidence-based practices. Accordingly, interventions that improve team functioning can improve teams’ performance and capacity to implement evidence-based practices. However, most effective team interventions have been developed in university laboratories or military settings, with those in healthcare focused on acute care settings. Effective strategies for enhancing and sustaining healthy team functioning in CACs and other non-acute service settings are lacking. The proposed study will use a stakeholder-engaged approach to adapt an evidence-based team training intervention – TeamSTEPPS – for CAC multidisciplinary teams.
4. Preventing Violence and Improving Community Mental Health in Fineview & Perry Hilltop
PIs: Joanna Deming, MSW, Fineview/Perry Hilltop Citizens Councils and Mary L. Ohmer, PhD, School of Social Work
Community and youth violence are critical public health issues that compromise the strength of communities, permanently damaging residents’ mental health and wellbeing. Research shows that exposure to community and youth violence can lead to increased risk for poor mental health, including stress, anxiety and depression. However, research also shows that relationships of trust among residents and their willingness to intervene to address neighborhood problems helps to prevent community and youth violence and improve community mental health. This social process is called “collective efficacy.” Moreover, partnerships between young people and adults in disadvantaged neighborhoods offer a promising approach for addressing violence and community mental health issues. However, there have been few attempts to translate this evidence into practice. This project fills this gap by bringing together youth and adult residents to facilitate collective efficacy in the Perry Hilltop and Fineview neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. This team proposes to implement a community-based intervention that builds collective efficacy by facilitating trusting relationships among youth and adults, changing community norms and values to support the prevention of violence and promotion of community mental health and wellbeing, and increasing residents’ ability to restoratively and safely intervene in neighborhood violence and mental health issues. The intervention has 3 phases: (1) organizing and mobilizing residents around the community’s responsibility to prevent violence and promote mental health; (2) a collective efficacy training program for youth and adults; and (3) a community-based prevention project to engage participants and the wider community to apply what residents learn during the training to address a community identified violence and mental health issue.