These award winning community based programs are designed to offer home-based or community psychiatric care to children and adolescents with treatment goals to help preserve the family structure. It is a strength based approach focused on making use of community supports for the youth and family to make positive behavioral changes.
It is comprised of a Multi-Systemic Therapy (MST) team, an Intensive Family Therapy (IFT) team, and a Rapid Response Intervention (RR).
Community based psychiatry therapists work with pediatric patients and their families to make positive behavioral changes for success in school, home, and community. The goal of all community based psychiatric work is management of behaviors to prevent out of home placement in psychiatric hospitals, detention centers, or foster care.
- Our interventions are designed to assist parents with increasing monitoring and supervision of the youth and involve multiple “stakeholders” including: parents, family, school, work, probation/ diversion, social services, mental health clinicians, peers, church, and any other identifiable positive relationships.
- It is a brief treatment (3-6 months) that has intense contact (6-10 hours/ week) to service families. Therapists’ caseloads are small (4-6 cases) and allow for 24/7 coverage, with the support of the UCH Emergency Department’s Psychiatric/ Social Liaison.
- We provide follow-up care to our clients on a no fee basis depending on need and appropriateness. This may included previously scheduled meetings, court appearances, appointments or refresher sessions for our client.
Mutli-Systemic Therapy (MST) is an evidenced based therapy with intense clinical supervision and consultation with our therapists that seeks to understand the “fit” between the child/adolescents problems and the systemic factors that contribute to them. MST targets youth involved in the legal system, age 12-17, with co-occurring mental health issues.
Referrals can come from individual families, from the Juvenile District or Municipal Court System, the County Department of Human Services for adjudicated youth, or from hospital or mental health centers.
- Typical referral behaviors include: truancy/negative school performance, out of control behaviors in the home (including verbal & physical aggression), inefficient family functioning, ineffective parenting, low monitoring and supervision, substance use, gang involvement, negative peer associations, poor management of psychiatric symptoms, criminal activity.
- All clinicians are fully trained in the MST model. UCH is a site licensed by MST Services, an evidenced based model developed out of the Medical University of South Carolina. MST is recognized nationally as a “best practices” model for adjudicated youth.
Intensive Family Therapy (IFT) uses an integrative approach, accessing multiple theories in a brief, strength based, intensive format that focuses on the most acute areas of need contributing to family dysfunction. IFT targets children & youth, age 0-17, with mental health issues that disrupt his/ her family or social relationships. Referrals usually come as a step-down from inpatient hospitalizations, or from outpatient clinicians / case workers / school staff seeking to avoid hospitalization, to provide appropriate care to the client.
- Typical referral behaviors include: low levels of parental structure / consistency in the home, inappropriate discipline, ineffective parenting techniques, poor school performance, low frustration tolerance, significant mental health challenges and interpersonal issues.
- Therapists work closely with the client’s school and community. Within the school, the therapist assists with issues related to: acting out behaviors, impulsivity, inattentiveness, social skills deficits, truancy, tardiness, academic struggles, and others. Therapists often attend IEP meetings to assist with advocating for families to help clients receive most appropriate services for their academic and/or behavioral needs.
Rapid Response Team is an additional benefit provided to Medicaid patients who have been admitted to The Children’s Hospital Psychiatric Inpatient Unit to assist with safety planning and psychiatric stabilization with a focus on a child/ adolescent’s transition to home and school.
- The UCH CBP therapist is tasked with outreaching the family within 48 hours of hospitalization to provide supportive services, and intensive case management to the patient and professionals involved on the inpatient unit and to assist with the family’s follow through of the discharge plan.
- Rapid Response is short term intervention lasting up to 2 months, after which time a family may be able to transition into our IFT/ MST programs if it is clinically appropriate.
Referral to Denver County Community Based Psychiatry