Information Center Bulletin
Volume 3, No. 2

CMHS Centers Build "Systems of Care" For Children and their Families

The Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) supports four technical assistance (TA) centers dedicated to improving the lives of children with serious emotional disturbances and their families. These TA centers accomplish their goals by creating “systems of care.”

“Systems of care” are locally tailored and integrated services that can help children and their families successfully cope with and overcome the difficulties presented by serious emotional disturbances. “Systems of care” include respite care, mental health counseling, neuropsychological testing, academic support, speech therapy, legal assistance, and primary physical care.

In addition to being locally tailored and integrated, services are:

• Created to meet the unique needs of each child;
• Provided at or close to home whenever possible;
• Designed to be culturally appropriate for the community; and
• Planned in collaboration with both parents and professionals.

The National Resource Network for Child and Family Mental Health Services (NRN), located in Washington, DC, acts as a coordinating center for the 31 grantees involved in the CMHS Children and Their Families Program. The grantees, ranging from single neighborhoods to entire states, are building “systems of care” for children with serious emotional disturbances and their families. The goal of this TA center is to provide a flexible array of resources to meet training and technical assistance needs of each grantee. The NRN also helps to support the CMHS Comprehensive Mental Health Services for Children and Their Families Program, a public information campaign on children’s mental health.

The National Technical Assistance Center for Children’s Mental Health, also in Washington, DC, is a national resource center for policy and technical assistance to improve service delivery and outcomes for children and adolescents with, or at risk of developing, serious emotional disturbance and their families. Its expertise includes system planning, interagency coordination and collaboration across the major child-serving systems, financing, managed care, service development and integration, human resource development, family involvement, cultural competence, early intervention, and service issues for special populations of high-risk children and youth.

The Research and Training Center for Children’s Mental Health, in Tampa, FL, contributes to the emerging system of care knowledge base through research, consultation, technical assistance, evaluation, and dissemination. Among its areas of research are the effects of service system reform and school restructuring, demographic characteristics of youngsters with serious emotional or behavioral disabilities and their use of the service system, the use of functional outcome measures in service delivery systems, and the effects of health care reform on service delivery.

The Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health, in Portland, OR, improves services to families whose children have mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders through research that is clustered around five themes: family participation in services, family participation in policy decisions, families and out-of-home care, evaluation of family organizing efforts, and interventions in professional education.

All four children’s mental health TA centers can be reached through the Information Center's web site at mentalhealth.samhsa.gov. Each center can also be reached directly by telephone:

• National Resource Network for Child and Family Mental Health Services, 202-408-9320.
• National Technical Assistance Center for Children’s Mental Health, 202-687-5000.
• Research and Training Center for Children’s Mental Health, 813-974-4661.
• Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health, 503-725-4040.

Information Center Bulletin
Volume 3, No. 2