By Daphne Campo, Undergraduate Research Assistant

As it stands today, low-resource schools in urban areas provide mental health support through contracted community mental health workers. While it is necessary to provide such care for all children in the school system, this poses a larger problem; these kinds of services can face team functioning problems and may not operate as effectively as originally intended. Using a training program that is backed by the current body of knowledge, how do we implement this to improve team efficacy? Is it feasible to simply train these teams, or do further steps need to be taken before any improvement is shown?

TeamSTEPPS (Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety) is a training program developed by the researchers in tandem with stakeholders to improve health care teams in general, and is able to adapt to many contexts. For the purposes of this investigation, TeamSTEPPS was piloted in school mental health care services to attempt to enhance team functioning (three schools were randomly assigned to receive the training). What the researchers found instead is that implementing such a program into the framework of existing school mental health care systems proved to be difficult. However, with careful attention to the obstacles and context of the school, TeamSTEPPS can in fact be put in place, but future studies should be done to move past these obstacles and get into the meat of the implementation process so it can be studied in-depth.

So what held the researchers back? A common challenge with implementing a training program such as TeamSTEPPS is that it must operate within the context of the workplace in question. Turnover, employees transfers, and other job-related realities thus posed a challenge to the study of the implementation of the program – all of which are simply realities of the workforce that need to be considered with a training program such as this. Some very important people in the study either left that particular school or left the job altogether. For a new pilot program with no mechanism for training the new staff that came in their place, these obstacles provided valuable feedback about what the next steps are in getting TeamSTEPPS up and running.

There is great opportunity for future study here. The researchers are considering how adding a training module for new staff mid-school year may work in the program. Thus far, TeamSTEPPS has elicited a very positive reaction from the mental health care workers and, among other things, have learned that the employees enjoy being worked with closely by the researchers attempting to adapt it. It is a great start. Study on the implementation process and the steps thereafter are needed to finally see how the training program will improve mental health care services in schools.

 

Wolk, C.B., Stewart, R.E., Eiraldi, R., Cronholm, P., Salas, E., & Mandell, D.S. (2018). The Implementation of a Team Training Intervention for School Mental Health: Lessons Learned. American Psychological Association, 56(1), 83-90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pst0000179