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. Based on this review, this article proposes the Evidence-Based Practice in Systems of Care (EBP in SoC) model. The model describes how to incorporate evidence into every aspect of community-based SoCs for children with mental health concerns. Discussion of the model will focus on implications of using the framework for practitioners, mental health organizations, communities, and state and federal administration and policymaking.