Action Step: Increase community and state infrastructure for delivering preventive interventions for behavioral health problems in children and youth. 

Coalition members are working with several states to enhance and promote infrastructure to deliver tested and effective preventive interventions to children, youth, and families. Efforts to date have included statewide convenings of practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in Utah and Colorado. The CPBH has also provided testimony and consultation to a legislative commission in Massachusetts that led to a recent statewide plan to prevent behavioral health problems and promote healthy development in young people.

See Colorado’s new statewide prevention plan, Putting Prevention Science to Work: Colorado’s Statewide Strategic Plan for Primary Prevention of Substance Abuse.

Read about the Coalition’s State-Level Strategies to increase infrastructure for implementing tested and effective prevention programs!

Action Step: Scaling-up tested and effective family-focused interventions in pediatric and health care settings.

Recent changes within health care make primary care a potential home for family-focused prevention and suggest possibilities for sustainable funding of family-focused prevention programs. Members of the CPBH are participating in efforts to scale-up healthy parenting interventions in primary health care being led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Forum on Promoting Children’s Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Health.

Action Step: Preparing the social work workforce to deliver tested and effective preventive interventions for behavioral problems in children and youth.

Coalition members have initiated and are collaborating on several initiatives aimed at better preparing practitioners to deliver preventive interventions in behavioral health settings. Actions of this subcommittee include coordinating with accreditation bodies of professional degree programs, creating standardized learning objectives for prevention practice courses, identifying existing prevention training programs in allied disciplines, collating a repository of prevention course syllabi, and undertaking a systematic study of the integration of prevention content into broader programs of study.