• By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 25th March, 2010

Fresh green light for prevention Green Paper

The cause of prevention and early intervention continues to bob to the surface of UK politics, generally within eyeshot of the cross-party alliance between former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith and Nottingham North MP Graham Allen.Both men gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on youth crime whose report this week acknowledged an increasingly familiar argument in favor of long-t…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Wednesday 24th March, 2010

Effectiveness? Are you spelling that with an R or an A?

Coverage on the US Science magazine website of the Health Care Reform bill's safe passage burrows into the small print for the latest word on measuring "effectiveness"."Most directly tied to health care," Jocelyn Kaiser writes, "is language creating a new, independent, non-profit institute for comparative effectiveness research (CER) – evidence-based studies that compare the value of medical tre…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Tuesday 23rd March, 2010

"See-tee-see" edges toward prevention A-list

Latest studies of the the effectiveness of the Communities that Care (CtC) operating system as a vehicle for programs to help young people sidestep the pitfalls of their adolescence are showing modestly successful results.Mark Feinberg and his colleagues at Penn State and Kansas universities report in Prevention Science that among the 120 communities in Pennsylvania that have implemented CtC as pa…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Friday 19th March, 2010

Maybe we should get out there and sell something!

Cars are prototyped before they are put into mass production; they are rolled out to dealerships, where they are warrantied, repaired and part-exchanged. What is so different about public health programs, US researchers are asking – apart from the fact that they lack any marketing, distribution or servicing network?Matthew W. Kreuter of Washington University, St. Louis, and Jay M. Bernhardt from…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 18th March, 2010

Ready or not – just get on board

If an organization is all set for change, it is more likely to be able to implement new programs, and so assessing – and attending to – the readiness of the one is likely to improve the prospects of the other. That’s the theory. But does it work in practice? Two studies presented at this week’s National Institutes of Health conference in Bethesda, Maryland, shed some light. Amy Cohen and…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Wednesday 17th March, 2010

All that expert knowledge and they still don’t know

One of the advantages of implementing evidence-based programs with the help of an "operating system" is that community leaders have an opportunity to develop their own skills and resources as part of the process.But does providing technical assistance actually improve a community's capacity to select, implement and evaluate evidence-based programs? And does this expertise grow over time? A team f…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Monday 15th March, 2010

Implementation science – the real thing?

Researchers and evaluators are in Bethesda, Maryland, this week, to work at “methods and measurements” for a new science of dissemination and implementation.Few will dispute that there are big obstacles to the uptake of evidence-based interventions in children’s services, and that even when they are commissioned they are not necessarily implemented very well. Successful introduction is no gu…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Friday 12th March, 2010

London school trial speaks well for SPOKES

Were it possible to design a population-based intervention to tackle early-onset antisocial behavior, the savings, by any social, medical or financial reckoning, would be prodigious.The lifetime cost of answering the needs of a single high-risk young person has been calculated to be around $2m; individuals diagnosed with a conduct disorder at the age of ten cost society ten times as much by the ti…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 11th March, 2010

Introducing the near-perfect model of empathy

"Empathy" is becoming the new classroom buzzword, pressed into wide service to signpost a valuable sensitivity at the heart of social and emotional accomplishment.Not only in school: the online newspaper The Huffington Post lately made a splash of The Empathic Civilization by the "social and ethical prophet" Jeremy Rifkin.Rifkin's meditation on the "race to global consciousness in a world of crisi…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Wednesday 10th March, 2010

The secret of Home-Start is believing

Self efficacy is one of those precepts whose expression teeters between the wise and the painfully obvious. It proposes that people are more likely to act when they believe both that they are capable of carrying out a given action, and that this action will accomplish a desired goal.As a team of researchers from Utrecht University explain in this quarter’s Prevention Science, Albert Bandura’s…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Tuesday 09th March, 2010

The less "unwitting" way to get results

"All organizations (and systems) are designed, intentionally or unwittingly, to achieve precisely the results they get."It may be short on pith, but this quote, attributed to R. Spencer Darling, founder of The Leadership Institute Inc of Chicago, is a popular choice among implementation research PowerPoint presenters.It's all down to the sighing double-entendre of that "unwittingly". Not as good a…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Monday 08th March, 2010

Tuning the infant brain – in our time

Evidence of a developing consistency in attitude among neuroscientists and those economists and children and families policy makers who have been won over by the case for early intervention was audible on BBC radio, last week.One key connecting term is “regulation,” the importance of which was discussed in the latest BBC Radio 4 In Our Time broadcast and podcast on the infant brain and the psy…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Friday 05th March, 2010

Strengthening families with mindfulness

Researchers at Penn State University are claiming success in the preliminary rounds of their efforts to increase the potential of a program designed to strengthen relationships inside families.The University has announced findings from a pilot study, as it launches a larger community trial made possible by a $3.3million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The activity focuses o…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 04th March, 2010

Does doing it online mean doing it faithfully?

The Australian designers and providers of online courses in heath and well-being are claiming success in a randomized controlled trial of a curriculum-based alcohol and cannabis prevention program.CRUfAD Schools is a joint enterprise of the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety and Depression at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, and the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales.The repor…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Wednesday 03rd March, 2010

Head Start’s failings are no reason to stop

The latest discouraging findings as to the lasting benefits to children of the federal Head Start program highlight the need to separate the wheat from the chaff, US commentators argue.Disappointing as the latest results may be, say Isabel Sawhill and John Baron, de-funding Head Start, especially in these hard times, would be tantamount to giving up the fight against educational failure and povert…

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