Implementing a School-Based Child Mental Health Prevention Program in Uganda

描述（由申请人提供）：撒哈拉以南非洲（SSA）的儿童负担着重大的未满足的心理健康需求，但该地区获得心理健康工作者和资源来满足这些需求的机会有限。尽管许多家庭和学校干预暴力预防和心理健康促进的成功，大多数基于证据的预防方案还没有在SSA。这项建议（R21）旨在采用一项具有成本效益的人口战略，通过调整和实施一项由学校支持的以学校为基础的儿童心理健康预防方案-家长团（PC）-来解决现有的心理健康服务和资源缺口。儿童保护方案是一项针对弱势社区幼儿的、具有文化背景的普遍性学校干预措施。PC旨在促进1）教师和家长对儿童心理健康的知识; 2）教师和家长有效的行为管理实践; 3）教师和学校家庭参与的实践和政策;以及4）儿童的社会情感和行为能力，长期目标是预防心理健康问题，促进学校的成功和福祉。PC已被证明是高度可接受的种族多样化的人口在美国。它还对所有有针对性的教师，父母和儿童的结果产生了强大和持续的影响。然而，这个免费支持的计划不适用于美国以外的儿童。对《预防犯罪法》的修改将克服乌干达儿童获得普遍预防干预的障碍。该提案的目标是：1）为乌干达幼儿制定一项文化上知情的预防性保健适应方案，2）建设人力资源能力，以支持预防工作和预防性保健的实施; 3）在现实世界的学校环境中实施和评估预防性保健的有效性。拟议的研究涉及与乌干达精神卫生和公共卫生专家以及学校社区合作，以调整该计划，并实施和评估调整后的计划。该项目将产生一份适合乌干达国情的预防方案手册，将改善儿童心理健康方面的人力资源，并提供一个可行的实施过程。它还将促进该领域的知识，并提出新的政策和实践建议，以减少低资源国家儿童的全球心理健康负担。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children in Sub-Saharan-Africa (SSA) are burdened by significant unmet mental health needs, but this region has limited access to mental health workers and resources to address these needs. Despite the success of numerous family and school interventions for violence prevention and mental health promotion, most evidence-based preventive programs are not yet available in SSA. This proposal (R21) seeks to apply a cost-effective population strategy to address the existing mental health service and resource gaps by adapting and implementing an empirically-supported school-based child mental health preventive program, ParentCorps (PC), to schools in Uganda. PC is a culturally-informed universal school-based intervention for young children from disadvantaged communities. PC aims to promote 1) teacher and parent knowledge about child mental health; 2) effective behavior management practices by teachers and parents; 3) teacher and school family engagement practices and policies, and 4) child socioemotional and behavioral competencies with the long- term goal of preventing mental health problems and promoting school success and well-being. PC has been shown to be highly acceptable to ethnically diverse populations in the US. It also has robust and sustained effects on all targeted teacher, parenting, and child outcomes. Yet, this empirically-supported program is not available to children outside of the US. An adaptation of PC would overcome barriers to access universal preventive intervention for Ugandan children. The objectives of this proposal are to: 1) develop a culturally- informed adaptation of PC for Ugandan young children, 2) build human resource capacity to support prevention work and PC implementation; and 3) implement and evaluate the effectiveness of PC when delivered in a real-world school setting. The proposed research involves collaboration with Ugandan mental health and public health experts and school communities to adapt the program, and implement and evaluate the adapted program. This project will yield a prevention program manual that fits the context of Uganda, will improve human resources in child mental health, and provide a feasible implementation process. It will also advance the fields' knowledge and generate new policy and practice recommendations to reduce the global mental health burden among children in low-resource countries.