Evidence Based Practice in Systems of Care for Children with Complex Mental Health Needs.

Community-based social work with families and youth with complex behavioral health needs highlights challenges to incorporating empirical evidence into routine practice. This article presents a framework for integrating evidence in community-based Systems of Care for these children and their families. This article reviews research on various approaches to integrating evidence into children's behavioral health and community-based care and contextualizes it within dominant paradigms of Systems of Care (SoC) and Wraparound principles.

The Strengths of Youth in a Public Behavioral Health System: Measurement Choices, Prevalence Rates, and Group Differences.

Youth with severe emotional and behavioral problems receiving services in public behavioral health systems have strengths that are understudied in research and underutilized in practice. This study explores four alternative strategies (individual item scores, the number of "actionable" strengths, subscales, and a total composite) for summarizing the strengths of youth assessed with the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) in a large, urban, public behavioral health system. The paper examines whether these summarization strategies produce divergent understandings of the prevalence of strengths across gender, age, and racial groups.