| Youth Service Development in Ireland |
|
REACH of Louisville is working with Headstrong, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health, in the planning and evaluation of a new system of supports that will improve the health and well-being of young people in Ireland. The goals of Headstrong are to:• promote better integration between multiple services and disciplines to provide better, more rounded care to young people; • develop the skills and confidence of the youth mental health workforce (youth workers, general practitioners, psychiatrists, counsellors, etc.) enabling them to provide best in class care for young people; • enhance mental health literacy amongst young people and the wider community; • reduce public stigma about mental health problems; and, • to demonstrate the effectiveness of this new model of youth mental health care, providing the evidence and impetus for further support and investment. REACH is assisting Headstrong by: • generating useful management-oriented information that contributes to understanding about the problems of adolescents in the Irish experience; • encouraging the planning, development, and evaluation of community-level initiatives for young people that utilize multi-level, integrated strategies and have the potential to demonstrate broad-based systems change within an evaluable format; • promoting the development and evaluation of targeted prevention and intervention activities that concentrate on risk and resilience factors for young people; • facilitating continuous quality improvement of programs and practices in mental health and related areas by making available findings from research and evaluation, and enabling more fine-grained research through the organization of data that can be displayed and understood by programme planners and administrators; and, • enabling the integration of programs across the community in the service of teamwork, efficient resource allocation, and programme effectiveness. |