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New Tool to Shed Light On, Improve Teen Mental Health Services |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Until now, doctors and clinicians treating teens with mental health concerns were in the same position as that blindfolded archer, providing services week after week with no objective and systematic feedback about the effects of their treatment. A new tool developed by Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development researchers will remove that blindfold by providing ongoing feedback to service providers, with a goal of enabling mid-course treatment corrections. The tool is called the Peabody Treatment Progress Battery, or PTPB. "There are laboratory studies that show treatments are very effective with youth who have mental health concerns, but when we look in the real treatment world we are hard pressed to identify services that are effective," Leonard Bickman, director of the Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement and associate dean for research at Peabody College, said. "Providers of children's mental health services have long expressed their frustration to the research community at the lack of a comprehensive, feasible and scientifically developed set of measures for assessing process and outcome. "The PTPB is the first comprehensive set of measures that can be used routinely to assess process and outcomes of treatment services across multiple domains and perspectives and it meets the highest level of scientific rigor. In addition to monitoring the teen's response to treatment, the PTPB also evaluates how the child's caregiver is managing stress and their perception of treatment progress, as well as the clinician's own evaluation of progress."
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