How do we know our efforts are successful?
View a power point of our Community Scorecard 2016
We have completed a Local Evaluation 2011 to 2015 which you can download in its entirety (35-pages). It is very exciting to see that the children and adolescents of the county are already benefiting from the changes we have made in our system of care!
1. Increase capacity of system of care.
In 2011, as a community, we recognized that there were many children who were likely in need of services that they weren’t receiving. This observation was troubling because our mental health system was already rather overwhelmed with the demands being placed upon it. We decided we needed to increase the number of providers, increase the skills of our providers for certain types of treatments and fill in some gaps with new services. Read in this section of the report about our progress increasing the capacity within the medical, juvenile justice, and educational sectors. There has already been a 67% increase in the number of children and adolescents served at our community mental health center, Institute for Human Resources.
2. Increase accessibility of services.
In rural communities, often families face barriers to accessing services. This brief section provides data about some of our efforts to understand and overcome these barriers.
3. Increase coordination of services.
As we utilize all of our resources across educational, medical, juvenile justice, and mental health sectors, coordination has become increasingly important both in terms of communication between providers who are simultaneously working with a particular child and/or during a smooth transition when one provider refers a child to another. This brief section contains data about a number of outcomes we are monitoring across the various sectors that are expected to improve as a result of our coordinated efforts over the course of time (e.g. graduation rates, emergency room visits, juvenile police reports).
4. Decrease risk behaviors & mental disorders.
This extensive section of the report includes all the data we have collected about the functioning of our children when we started the initiative (i.e. engagement in risky behaviors, symptoms of depression/anxiety) as well as the early results of our efforts to promote children’s healthy development. In 2013, we were able to screen 78% of all 0-18 year olds and found that about 11% were “at-risk” of developing more significant social-emotional-behavioral problems. Eighty percent of these at-risk youth received services in their schools. As you will read in this document, we have reason to believe that our prevention and early intervention efforts are already reducing the number of at-risk youth.
