On November 21st, the Institute for Behavior Change will host a conference for parents and professionals at the Eden Resort in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to explain how Medicaid funding for necessary mental health treatment services for children can be easily and consistently obtained, how to identify the components and characteristics of excellent behavioral treatment services, and how to retain Medical Assistance (MA) funding for needed behavioral treatment services until the treatment plan is finished.

This information was presented to an enthusiastic audience at the bi-annual Training Institutes in Nashville in July, along with outcome research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on more than 300 individual treatment plans for children with Autism spectrum disorders, ADHD and other conditions that found our treatment model to be associated with substantial behavioral change in children and worthy of further study.

The program will describe the Medicaid funding system for Behavioral Health Rehabilitation Services (BHRS, often mistakenly called "wraparound" services in Pennsylvania) in detail, with a national scope but an emphasis on Pennsylvania. The keynote address will be by Robert Cormany, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association of Pupil Services Administrators (PAPSA).

I hope that you will be interested in learning what we’ve done to integrate “high-fidelity Wraparound” (I’ve been an advisor to the National Wraparound Initiative since 2006), with a viable treatment model that brings skilled professionals into children’s homes and schools, and that has been funded without fail for the past 16 years at no cost to parents in Pennsylvania (regardless of their income).

A registration form is available at www.ibc-pa.org -- the fee for the conference is $40 and includes lunch.

Steve Kossor
Licensed Psychologist
Certified School Psychologist
Executive Director, The Institute for Behavior Change
www.ibc-pa.org

Discussions during the breakfast and lunch meetings at the 11th Annual Conference on Advancing School-Based Mental Health (hosted by the CSMHA in Baltimore, October, 2006; see meeting notes in Repository) point to TWO SIGNIFICANT PROJECTS for this Practice Group on Quality and Evidence-Based Practice:
1 - Develop a paper helping to define constructs related to evidence-based practice in school mental health, with an emphasis on providing families and schools with knowledge to assist them as consumers of school mental health services.
2 - Conduct a survey of sites asking the “Who? Where? What? How?” of their programs, with an emphasis on evaluation methods and results
If you are interested in leading or participating in either of these efforts, please email Sharon Stephan (QEBP co-facilitator) at sstephan@psych.umaryland.edu

Our goal is to provide resources and promote sharing of information across individuals and groups interested in advancing the quality of school-based mental health. We invite feedback and suggestions! If you have any suggestions, updates, archives and/or topics of discussion relevant to this practice group site, please send directly to Sharon Stephan (Q-EBP facilitator) at: sstephan@psych.umaryland.edu.

This year the CSMHA received a record number of proposals. Even more importantly, these proposals reflected a greater diversity of stakeholders than has been seen in the first 10 years of the national meeting. The Quality and Evidence-Based Practice track received a very large number of excellent proposals. Thank you to members of the practice group who assisted in the review process!
See the breakdown of submissions in the Archive Section of this site.