Summarizes the 20-year history of the Appalachian Regional Commission's innovative, flexible, $550M model health care delivery system. Cites achievements in establishing primary care clinics; tackling black lung disease; and expanding health manpower, health education, maternal and child health care, and rehabilitation centers. (NEC)

Traces Southern West Virginia Regional Health Council's decade of delivering/linking cradle-to-grave health services for 500,000 rural residents. Describes microwave communications radio network; clinics; services in family planning, genetic counseling, prenatal care, maternal/child care, nutrition, heart/respiratory disease screening, renal…

Describes the implementation of a collaborative discharge planning program for a chronic psychiatric population. Emphasizes the importance of good communication between patient and professionals. Presents a case example. Findings suggest more substantial involvement of patients in after-care programs is needed. (Author/JAC)

Provides background on national movements toward expanded school mental health programs and school-based health centers, and presents advantages and challenges of joining these two systems of child and adolescent health care. These challenges, ideas for overcoming them, and future directions for promising service delivery are discussed. (Contains…

Examines how student health care in a K-8 Title I district functioned overall and how school administrators interacted with on-campus health care providers. Minorities received inadequate care. Administrators did not routinely associate students' health with their school performance and were not adept at assisting providers. (Contains 65…

Within the past decade the role of the primary care physician caring for older patients has expanded to include counseling and "healthy aging" education to reduce multiple behavior risk factors. Project AGE WELL was a longitudinal study of the impact of a comprehensive and team delivered health promotion program on the health status of the…

Sponsored by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the workshop concentrated on ways and means of delivering health services from prenatal care to adolescence with an accent on preventative medicine. (KR)

Agencies providing mental health and counseling services to Black males must: use a seeking mode of service delivery; have staff diversity; destigmatize the counseling process; make use of Black psychology; develop relationships with community, agencies, and organizations; distinguish between presence and programing; and develop innovative ways of…

Describes the Connecticut Unit of Service System, a unified system for quantifying services and service delivery that is administratively useful in monitoring and allocating resources. Includes a Relative Value Scale which incorporates staff time and related work to allow a comparison of inpatient and outpatient service. (JAC)

In recent years, the mental health community has made great strides in understanding more about the delivery of mental health services, improving efficiency and quality in services, and also about how to build strengths and resilience in the face of lifes stresses. This volume adds to the knowledge base so that the important task of system change…

Reports the results of a state-by-state (N=27) survey of mental health services available for older persons and compares the extent of need and existing federal mandates. Results show 52 percent of respondents provide mental health services for older adults, while 22 percent include older adults with the general public. (Author/JAC)

Examines how community mental health practitioners are likely to implement services for improving community-based care of the chronically mentally disabled. Describes a scale for administrators to assess practitioner orientations and thereby anticipate compliance problems. Suggests ways administrators may alleviate these problems. (Author)

This article presents challenges facing child mental health services research and the contributions made by the series of papers in this journal issue. The series illustrates two major categories of services research: systems level research and clinical services level research. Methodological issues, particularly for randomized clinical trials in…

This article explores an approach for better serving the complete health care needs of children, specifically, the efficacy of school-based health centers (SBHCs) to provide a service delivery mechanism capable of functioning as a medical home for children, providing primary care for both their physical and behavioral health care needs. The…

Rural outreach in community mental health centers involves staff commuting from a central agency to surrounding rural towns to provide clinical and/or community service. The problem for outreach staff is how to best provide services to a rural network that is distant and different from the urban network. In general the greater the distance, the…