Partner Spotlight  |   Mar 23, 2023  |   2 minute read

UConn Health’s Child and Family Development Program Partners with Greenspace Health to Better Support Parents and Their Children with Behavioral Health Challenges

Key Assessments:

  • Parental Stress Scale (PSS)
  • Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC)

 

UConn Health Southington and Greenspace Health are thrilled to announce their collaboration on an exciting MBC pilot supporting UConn’s Child and Family Development Program (CFDP). Led by David P. FitzGerald, Ph.D, their free 8-10 week parenting groups and clinical support services are designed to support the parents of children 6-17 years old who are experiencing behavioral health challenges.

Through regular assessments, program leads will monitor child functioning, parental stress, and the impact of parental stress on the mental health outcomes of their children. Sessions are aimed at strengthening parents’ ability to support their children through their behavioral health challenges, nurture their child’s development and empower families to strengthen their emotional connections. The ultimate goal of the program is to improve the socialization and mental well-being of children.

UConn has partnered with Greenspace to support this process through the implementation of Measurement-Based Care. The CFDP will leverage the Greenspace MBC platform to transition from paper and pen assessments and manual data entry to digital assessment completion, as well as automatically visualized and generated insights for quality improvement (QI) and reporting. This will help alleviate the workload that comes with manual measurement processes, while empowering program leads to analyze parent and child outcomes based on any data subset to inform session discussions, treatment plans, and program improvements.

“I sought a solution that would automate the deployment, scoring, and interpretation of assessments in a way that would optimize patient response rates and provide the tools necessary to use measurement to inform treatment, both at the patient-level and clinic-wide. Greenspace was the solution. Their Measurement-Based-Care platform is intuitive, versatile, and frankly a game-changer when it comes to embracing measurement-based care. The assessment repository is impressive, and the option to add new instruments reflects their focus on accommodating existing clinic preferences and workflows with minimal interruption. Greenspace has dramatically improved our capacity to effectively serve our patient population”.

– Damion Grasso, PhD, Associate Professor & CT Licensed Clinical Psychologist at UConn Health, Co-author of Structured Trauma-Related Experiences and Symptoms Screener (STRESS). 

“The Child and Family Development Program team at UConn Health is looking forward to using Greenspace to enhance our ability to monitor parent and child functioning and measure the impact of our services”.

– David FitzGerald, PhD, Director, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic

UConn Health received a community foundation grant to launch this program. At the end of the first year of the pilot, they plan to share their process and report on program engagement, overall results, and learnings. The goal being to expand the program and replicate its success across additional UConn Health locations in the future.

UConn Health Southington and Greenspace Health are thrilled to partner together to improve outcomes for children, teens, and their families. To learn more about the Child and Family Development Program, visit their website.

For more information on Measurement-Based Care (MBC), explore the below links: