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Effective Approaches Overcome Barriers to Care

• With its focus on parent-child relationship-based approaches, the Helping Families Raise Healthy Children initiative improved cross-system care for families at risk for parental depression and early childhood developmental delays.
• Providers and agencies from the early intervention and behavioral health systems collaborated to achieve high rates of screening, referral, and engagement in services by using extensive outreach as well as in-home screening and mobile care.
• Through cross-system training and support, the initiative helped build system capacity for sustaining these improvements and improved outcomes for parents and children.

Cross-System Support Improves Understanding of Family Needs

• Caregivers in both the early development and behavioral health systems gained a greater understanding of the related issues faced by families at risk for parental depression and early childhood developmental delays.

Many families experience the often co-occurring challenges of parental depression and early childhood developmental delays. The Helping Families Raise Healthy Children initiative, implemented in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, addressed these challenges by mobilizing and aligning the early intervention and behavioral health systems. The initiative focused on three components of service delivery: (1) screening and identification of families at risk for parental depression, (2) referrals for those identified as being at risk, and (3) engagement in relationship-based services provided by both the early intervention and behavioral health systems that addressed the needs of parents and young children in a parent-child relationship context. More than 4,000 caregivers (primarily mothers) received formal screening for depression through the initiative, representing a screening rate of 63 percent. In addition to formal screening, some self-identified or were identified by community partners as being at risk for depression. In total, nearly 700 caregivers at risk for depression were identified. Among these, the referral rate was 62 percent; 71 percent of those referred engaged in services. These high rates of referral and engagement likely reflect several important components of the initiative that were designed to reduce barriers to obtaining services, including the provision of mobile services, an emphasis on the parent-child relationship in both early intervention and behavioral health settings, and improvement of cross-system communication and collaboration. The Helping Families Raise Healthy Children initiative demonstrates the potential gains associated with improved cross-system care, and could serve as a model for similar initiatives in a variety of domains.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Methods

• Chapter Three

  Results

• Chapter Four

  Discussion

• Chapter Five

  Conclusions, Recommendations, and Next Steps

• Appendix A

  Training Assessments

• Appendix B

  Data Collection Tools

• Appendix C

  Outcome Measure Linkages

• Appendix D

  Reference Studies