A Cross-Site Partnership to Examine Implementation and Sustainability of a School-Based Trauma Program

Schools have been identified as an ideal setting for increasing access to mental health services particularly for underserved minority youth. The emerging field of implementation science has begun to systematically investigate strategies for more efficiently integrating evidence-based practices into community settings. Significantly less translational research has focused specifically on the school setting. To address this need, we examined the implementation of a school-based trauma intervention across three distinct regions.

We conducted key informant interviews guided by Mendel's Framework of Dissemination in Health Services Intervention Research with multiple school stakeholders to examine what school organizational characteristics influence the adoption and implementation process and sustainability of Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS). Participants were selected from schools in three geographic regions in the United States: Western, Midwestern, and Southern.

Our findings reveal that while sites had some common organizational factors that appeared to facilitate implementation, regions differed in how they compensated for less robust implementation domains. Across all regions, school stakeholders recognized the need for services to support students impacted by trauma. In the Western region, there was no centralized district policy for implementation; therefore, implementation was facilitated by school-level change agents and supervision support from the district mental health unit. In the Midwestern region, centralized district policies drove implementation. In both the Midwestern and Southern regions, implementation was facilitated by collaboration with a local mental health agency.

This study contributes to the paucity of empirical information on the organizational factors that influence the implementation of evidence-based mental health interventions in schools. Our findings reveal that different implementation strategies across policies, structures, and resources can result in implementation of a school-based intervention. Frameworks such as Mendel's can be helpful in identifying areas of strength and improvement of implementation within a school organization.