Title

Youth and parents who experienced poor quality or abusive residential care share their passion for the importance of a home and community based system of care.

Organizer: Charles Huffine, MD

Second, Third and Forth Presenter

Youth Experience of poor care in residential treatment

Kat Whitehead ?

Chris Noroski ?

Angelique Rochelle ?

Heather Harding ?

Parent Experience with poor care in residential treatment

Cynthia Clark ?

Susan Lawrence ?

Objectives

Understand the desperation many parents feel when they cannot find effective care for their children or youth in their home communities

Understand the nature of residential programs which give ineffective, or at times abusive care, how they have effected certain families and ways to identify such programs

Share ways in which community based residential care and hospitalization can be integrated into the system of care

Description

Youth who have experienced ineffective or abusive care in residential treatment, and their parents who have been disillusioned by such programs, will share their experiences and contrast them with what they are learning about a community based Systems of Care. They will share their sense of the importance of having such community based and integrated care available so as to prevent other families from being vulnerable to the slick web-based advertising of many residential programs. Participants will be offered thoughtful advice on choosing residential programs for their teenagers based on an FDA documents and the work of A START and CAFETY, both advocacy agencies. The goal of these advisories will be to help parents evaluate the claims of residential programs. There will be a thorough discussion of the shortage of effective community programs, the poor access to care for many families and parents desperation that leads them to believe the often excessive claims of residential programs far from their homes. The appropriate use of hospitalization and short term residential care will then be discussed as effective levels of care for certain children or youth who struggle with behavioral and emotional problems. Participants will learn how such facilities, when not remote from the family’s community, can be integrated into the system of care and thereby participate in smooth transitions for children and youth back into the community. In such cases hospital and residential programs can be participants in the planning for an individualized treatment or care plan along with parents, older youth and representatives of other agencies in the system of care. The presenters will emphasize that empowered families and youth mobilized in organizations are essential change agents in assuring that Systems of Care live up to their promise, assure that in wraparound planning family support specialists are key members of the team and get respect as partners from all professionals and agency representatives including residential programs and hospitals.

Methods of Presentation

The institute will open with an introduction and some didactic information regarding the residential treatment world. Parents and youth will tell their stories and may create some experiential activities to demonstrate what it was like for them during the residential experience. Such activities will convey powerfully what it is for a youth to be dis-empowered and for families to be caught up in their decision to place their child, then the disillusionment and coming to believe their youth's stories. At the end of this section information will be given on how to evaluate the quality and safety of a residential facility. There will be sufficient time for discussion.

In the next section a model will be presented of how residential care along with hospitalization can take its place as legitimate elements in a system of care. In the subsequent discussion presenters and the audience will join in sharing where levels of care are coordinated well or poorly in a systemically coordinated way of meeting the needs of children, youth and their families.