Quality Improvement Activities and Expanded School Mental Health Services

Abstract

Quality improvement (QI) activities, designed to enhance program evaluation efforts and to improve quality of care, have become increasingly important in children's services research. QI activities examine outcomes and provide accountability data that can be very useful for telling the story of the development, implementation, and effectiveness of expanded school mental health (ESMH) programs. This article discusses the implementation and results of QI activities for two ESMH programs, one relatively new program, and one with 10 years of experience. When presenting each case example, the authors review key QI activities such as developing new measures and interventions, evaluating costs of care, and disseminating results to clinicians, program administrators, and funders. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of QI in school-based mental health and reviews directions for future research and program development.

Bully/Victim Problems Among Preschool Children: a Review of Current Research Evidence

“…These include (a) playground activities available to children for example cooperative versus competitive activities (Nabors et al 2001;Pellegrini et al 2004), (b) the ratio of playground supervisors to children (Ladd and Price 1993;Leff et al 2004), (c) active supervision (Leff et al 2003Nabors et al 2004), and (d) playground rules (Leff et al 2003). Bliding et al (2002) showed that the major part of bullying takes place before and after lessons, in corridors, near lockers and toilets, in the children's pause areas, and outside the building while in the same study, several places were described as unsafe by others.…”

Quality-Directed Activities and Barriers to Quality in Social Service Organizations

“…Case studies of quality efforts within a single agency or system have been published (Yeaman et al, 2000;Nabors, Neff, & Power, 2004;Daleiden & Chorpita, 2005) as well as individual initiatives across programs (Carrilio, Packard, & Clapp, 2003), but we were unable to locate any studies that examined quality-directed activities across agencies from multiple service sectors.…”

The President’s New Freedom Commission: Capitalizing on Opportunities to Advance School-Based Mental Health Services

“…Considering that the majority of students receive mental health services through the schools instead of through university or communitybased settings (Kataoka, Zhang, & Wells, 2002), it seems logical to align research resources toward the development and evaluation of mental health promotion and intervention within the school environment. Historically, school-based mental health programs have done a poor job of implementing quality improvement activities (Nabors, Leff, & Power, 2004). Quality improvement activities, such as examining outcomes and providing data for accountability, will be a key area of development in the continued evaluation and expansion of expanded school mental health programs.…”