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）的儿童承受着巨大的未满足的精神卫生需求，但该地区获得精神卫生工作者和资源的机会有限，无法满足这些需求。尽管许多家庭和学校在预防暴力和促进心理健康方面的干预措施取得了成功，但大多数以证据为基础的预防方案尚未在SSA实施。该提案（R21）寻求采用具有成本效益的人口战略，通过在乌干达的学校调整和实施经验支持的以学校为基础的儿童心理健康预防方案“家长团”，来解决现有的心理健康服务和资源差距。PC是一种基于文化的普遍学校干预，针对来自弱势社区的幼儿。儿童心理健康计划旨在提高教师和家长对儿童心理健康的认识；2)教师和家长有效的行为管理实践；3)教师和学校的家庭参与实践和政策，以及4)儿童的社会情感和行为能力，其长期目标是预防心理健康问题，促进学校的成功和福祉。在美国，PC已经被证明是非常容易被不同种族的人接受的。它还对所有目标教师、父母和儿童的结果产生了强有力和持续的影响。然而，这个经验支持的项目并不适用于美国以外的儿童。改编个人方案将克服乌干达儿童获得普遍预防性干预的障碍。该提案的目标是：1)为乌干达幼儿开发一种文化知情的PC适应，2)建立人力资源能力，以支持预防工作和PC实施；3)在真实的学校环境中实施和评估PC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，以调整该方案，并实施和评估调整后的方案。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，并提供一个可行的执行过程。它还将促进这些领域的知识，并提出新的政策和做法建议，以减轻资源匮乏国家儿童的全球精神卫生负担。

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.