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得到满足的精神健康需求，但该地区获得精神卫生工作者和资源以满足这些需求的机会有限。尽管许多家庭和学校干预措施在预防暴力和促进心理健康方面取得了成功，但大多数循证预防方案在SSA还没有提供。这项提案(R21)寻求应用具有成本效益的人口战略来解决现有的心理健康服务和资源缺口，方法是在乌干达的学校改编和实施一项以经验为基础的学校为基础的儿童心理健康预防计划--家长队(PC)。PC是为来自弱势社区的幼儿提供的一种以文化为基础的普遍学校干预措施。其目的是促进1)教师和家长关于儿童心理健康的知识；2)教师和家长有效的行为管理做法；3)教师和学校家庭参与的做法和政策；以及4)儿童的社会情绪和行为能力，其长期目标是预防心理健康问题和促进学校的成功和福祉。个人电脑已被证明是高度可接受的种族在美国的人口。它还对所有有针对性的教师、父母和孩子的结果产生强大和持续的影响。然而，这个得到经验支持的项目不适用于美国以外的儿童。改编《儿童权利公约》将克服获得乌干达儿童普遍预防性干预的障碍。这项建议的目标是：1)为乌干达幼儿开发了解文化的个人计算机改编；2)建设人力资源能力，以支持预防工作和个人计算机的实施；3)在现实世界的学校环境中实施和评估个人计算机的有效性。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。该项目将制定一份适合乌干达国情的预防方案手册，改善儿童心理健康方面的人力资源，并提供可行的实施过程。它还将增进该领域的知识，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.