Building Bridges across the Judiciary, Child Welfare, and Child Mental Health: The Miami Child Well-Being Court Model Project

In 2007, an estimated 3.2 million referrals involving the alleged maltreatment of approximately 5.8 million children were made to CPS agencies, with the rate of victimization highest among children birth to three. Early exposure to maltreatment is associated with serious health disparities that continue into adolescence and adulthood. Evidence-based interventions that promote safe, stable, and nurturing relationships can reduce maltreatment recurrence, improve exposed children's health and behavioral outcomes, and prevent the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment. Our proposed session will report on an innovative judiciary-led model to increase the reach and effectiveness of one such intervention, child-parent psychotherapy, with adjudicated infants/toddlers and their mothers. Developed in the Miami-Dade Juvenile Court, in collaboration with early childhood experts at the University of Miami and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, this systems integration model makes the dependency court the platform for assuring timely referral to evidence-based treatment, monitoring child well-being, and ensuring the child's emotional well-being is at the center of judicial decision-making and permanency planning. The model is currently being disseminated in two new communities as part of a multi-site translation research study funded by the CDC/National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. We will describe the dissemination process and discuss strategies and barriers faced by the local implementation teams in Tallahassee, Florida, and Detroit, Michigan, to adopt the model. We will also briefly describe the study's mixed-method implementation and outcomes evaluation.