Front and center in the endeavor to "reform" health care is the appeal to change the culture of aging within provider organizations situated in the long-term care continuum. Person-centeredness is the latest philosophical overlay to aging care and supports and services. As a dominate paradigm guiding change, the movement intends to shift…

The Working Alliance, consisting of building bonds, establishing goals, and developing tasks, has been deemed the cornerstone of helping professions, and has been found to significantly and reliably predict client outcomes. The importance of client characteristics and perceptions of working alliance has been established in the literature. Less is…

In human services, clear definition of key concepts and strategies is critical to facilitating training, implementation, and research. This article reflects on methods undertaken to specify the wraparound process for children and families, and considers lessons that may be relevant to defining the system of care concept.

Federal, state, and local policymakers and funders have increasingly organized human service delivery functions around the selection and implementation of empirically supported interventions (ESIs), under the expectation that service delivery through such intervention frameworks results in improvements in cost-effectiveness and system performance.…

This study compared 248 graduating seniors with 301 beginning juniors at 10 bachelor's-level social work programs in the Northeast concerning their knowledge and attitudes regarding working with substance-abusing clients. Graduating seniors demonstrated modestly higher levels of knowledge and only slightly more positive attitudes toward working…

Demand for quality service provision in the human services industry requires that private nonprofit organizations have the administrative and management capacities to ensure successful implementation and sustain staff development programs. Unfamiliarity with implementation challenges, and limited awareness of implementation strategies, can trigger…

Background: There is an increasing need to identify effective mental health treatment practices for children and adolescents in community-based settings, due to current mixed findings of existing interventions. This study looked at adventure therapy (AT) as a viable option to meet this need. Objective: Using a sample of 1,135 youth from a…

The purpose of this study was to determine (a) the general knowledge bases demonstrated by school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in the area of genetics, (b) the confidence levels of SLPs in providing services to children and their families with genetic disorders/syndromes, (c) the attitudes of SLPs regarding genetics and communication…

YoungStar is a program of the Department of Children and Families (DCF) created to improve the quality of child care for Wisconsin children. YoungStar is designed to: (1) Evaluate and rate the quality of care given by child care providers; (2) Help parents choose the best child care for their kids; (3) Support providers with tools and training to…

The author analyzed the gender, grade, sources of referral, and problem areas of 1,664 student-clients who consulted a counseling center for individual counseling over an 11-year period. The results showed that grade, sources of referral, and problem areas varied significantly over the years whereas gender did not. Students who consulted the…

The value of a program can be understood as referring not only to outcomes, but also to how those outcomes compare to the types and amounts of resources expended to produce the outcomes. Major potential mistakes and biases in assessing the worth of resources consumed, as well as the value of outcomes produced, are explored. Most of these occur…

In 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a consensus statement on mental health recovery based on the New Freedom Commission's recommendation that public mental health organizations adopt a "recovery" approach to severe and persistent mental illness, including services to those dually diagnosed with mental health…

This study evaluated the impact of housing services among child welfare-involved families using observational data. Propensity score matching with data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being compared intact families (n = 183) who received housing services 12 months after initial investigation to nontreated families balanced on…

The development of trauma-informed child welfare systems (TICWSs) that advance individual agency practice to target transformation of the system as a whole has been conceptualized but not documented. A grassroots effort to build a TICWS with key participants (e.g., Department of Human Services, Community Mental Health, Family Court, schools) in…

The diversity perceptions of human service professionals may be critical indicators of effective service provision. Specifically, this study explored the disability perceptions of counselors, rehabilitation providers, and teachers (N = 172) enrolled in a large, southeastern university. A 76% response rate was achieved in the study, indicating…