Voices for Virginia’s Children has just issued a white paper authored by Jean Hovey entitled, “Intensive In-Home Services for Children’s Mental Health in Virginia: Time to Focus on Quality.” Read  and download the Executive Summary or the full White Paper here.

Intensive in-home services are an important part of a comprehensive array of mental health treatment options for children. This paper summarizes the history and recent trends affecting access to and quality of Medicaid-funded intensive in-home services in Virginia. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving these particular services and the entire array of services moving forward.

Recommendations:

1.      The top recommendation of this paper is to improve the consistency and quality of intensive in-home services in Virginia. This can be achieved by:

• developing Virginia’s practice models, and
• replicating existing models of excellence.

2.      In addition, improving the quality of in-home services must be part of developing a more robust array of services to reduce over-reliance on IIHS.

3.      To ensure the services are leading to positive outcomes for kids and families, Virginia must develop outcome measures on well-being of youth served.

4.      Finally, Virginia must be vigilant to ensure access to services through the transition to Medicaid care coordination.

Voices for Virginia’s Children will be working with its Campaign partners and other children’s mental health stakeholders to advocate for Virginia to address the concerns outlined in this paper by focusing on the recommendations.

 

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