This manual was designed primarily for use by people with disabilities. The hope is that it is also useful for families, as well as service coordinators and providers who directly assist families and individuals with disabilities. The focus of this manual is to provide easy-to-read information about available resources, and to provide immediate…

Health Maintenance Organizations are coming. It is imperative that each one of us in the health field, including college health personnel study them, understand them and, most of all, plan for them. Author outlines four specific proposals for effective development of an HMO. (Author/RK)

Proceedings from a 1980 symposium on the delivery of education and health services to handicapped children are summarized. Topics briefly addressed include funding, leadership and responsibility, communication and trust, and coordination and collaboration strategies. Fifteen conference recommendations are listed, including that each level of…

University medical centers must be prepared to produce additional qualified manpower and health care programs to be required by renewed health manpower legislation. (IR)

The mental health policies of the past 20 years and the evidence of unserved populations suffering from serious mental illness constitute a public health crisis. Currently there are at least 3,000,000 people in the United States suffering from mental disorders. A fully developed continuum of care is needed to respond effectively to the diverse…

As mental health policies and systems become subject to legislative and public scrutiny, more information is needed to evaluate such programs in the United States and abroad. A cross-national survey of 42 countries and provinces compared mental health policies, mental health services, awareness of these services, evaluation, and financing. Notable…

Due to the efforts of mental health consumer and advocacy organizations, there now exists a legislated community-based mental health policy for the treatment of children and adolescents with serious emotional disorders and their families. But the implementation of this policy has not met the intended legislative standards. Accordingly, this…

For certain groups of the mentally ill, most notably individuals with serious mental disabilities, the community-based mental health system can be more of a "non-system." Unforeseen problems have plagued both the dream of deinstitutionalization and the effectiveness of community mental health centers during the last 20 years. Uncoordinated…

The paper describes combined public education and community mental health in a preschool educational day treatment program for seriously emotionally disturbed children. The Developmental Therapy model on which the Tacoma, Washington, program is based is described as using five normal developmental stages to facilitate treatment which stresses the…

Supports renewed funding of the Appalachian Regional Commission's (ARC) "finish-up health plan" and "highway finish-up program." Discusses at length the need for primary care services, prevention of infant mortality, and the lack of physicians in Appalachia, and how the ARC plans can affect these needs. (LC)

Describes a rural West Virginia health-care center as a successful model program for integration between the clinic and community. Describes center facilities, funding sources, community cooperation, and cooperative residency program with regional medical school. Discusses implications for other medical-education programs. Describes differences…

Historically, the financial responsibility for caring for those with mental illness has shifted back and forth from the local community, to the state, to the federal government. Today states provide the vast majority of the funds to the state mental health agencies and oversee local governments and most private resources for mental health funding.…

After years of neglect, rural community mental health is becoming a legitimate area of specialization. Although the number of problems readily visible in rural mental health may appear to be inordinate, probabilities are that the difficulties found in rural locales are quantitatively no different than those found in non-rural areas. The…

This instructor's resource guide, one in a series of products from a project to develop an associate degree program for paraprofessional rural family health promoters, deals with teaching a course in health care organization and issues. Covered in the first section of the guide are the role of health care organization and health issues in rural…