Procurement Scope and Description
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Mental Health is soliciting Bidders for the acquisition of a children’s trauma evidence-based practice resource and referral service. The goals of the evidence-based practice resource and referral service are to: 1) Rapidly refer children in need of trauma treatment to those providers/practitioners who can provide state-of-the-art care. 2) Reduce the burden inherent in navigating the complex treatment systems on families and other referral sources (e.g. social workers, etc.) by maintaining a statewide database of providers trained to deliver evidence-based trauma treatments and facilitating a timely referral to a provider(s) based on age, gender, geography, and insurance type.
Background Information
Established in Chapter 321 of the Acts of 2008: An Act Relative to Children’s Mental Health, the mission of the Children’s Behavioral Health (CBH) Knowledge Center is to ensure that:
- The workforce of clinicians and direct care staff providing children’s behavioral health services are highly skilled and well-trained;
- The services provided to children in the Commonwealth are cost-effective and evidence-based; and
- The Commonwealth continues to develop and evaluate new models of service delivery.
The Children’s Behavioral Health Knowledge Center is located at the Department of Mental Health (DMH) in the Child & Adolescent Services Division. As part of the state’s mental health authority, the Knowledge Center’s purview is the entire children’s behavioral health system, across Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) agencies and public and private payers.
Consistent with this mission, the Knowledge Center is seeking to purchase a children’s trauma evidence-based practice resource and referral service. A 2012 report of the United States Attorney General’s National Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence, estimated that more than half of the children currently residing in the United States can expect to have their lives touched by violence, crime, abuse, and psychological trauma.[1] While not all children exposed to a traumatic event develop negative symptoms that require treatment as a result of trauma exposure, many do. It is critically important to assist children and their families in accessing treatment as quickly as possible to reduce the impact of trauma on their functioning.
A number of training initiatives and grants received by providers over the past few years such as the Massachusetts Child Trauma Project (MCTP) focused on building the competency of the workforce to deliver evidence-based trauma treatments resulting in an increase in the number of individuals trained to provide effective treatment for childhood trauma throughout Massachusetts. Over the course of the five year MCTP grant more than 500 individuals across the Commonwealth were trained in an evidence-based trauma treatment. Yet, rapid clinician mobility (i.e. moving to another employer, entering private practice, etc.) can make it difficult to connect a child with a trained clinician. Parents and other referral sources report long wait times and difficulty accessing appropriate care.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/defendingchildhood/cev-rpt-full.pdf