Purdue University Pediatric Access to Telemental Health Services Essay

Researching and Identifying an Evidence-based Strategy (3-5 pages)

Agency: PATHS Alabama

a. Research an evidence-based strategy that has been used to address your need. These should be an intervention, approach, or program that has been used to address your identified need. These strategies may be found in peer-reviewed literature, grey literature from programmatic or evaluation reports, examples from state or community programs, or on scholarly websites that present evidence-based or evidence-informed strategies. You must discuss the strategy as a potential intervention for your need (who, what, where, outcome/impact/results) and cite the source(s).

b. Given what you have learned about this agency, what the agency believes are its priorities, the context of the community or population served by the agency, and what you have learned through the research of the strategies, select an intervention you believe is most appropriate to address the need. You can also decide that you want to implement a combination of two interventions or even pull parts from each to create a program intervention that best addresses your identified need within the context of your agency and the community it serves. See the example below.

c. Clearly discuss, justify, and support why you chose the intervention approach or modified intervention approach you plan to implement.

Example: Let’s say your group decided to address the identified need “high teen pregnancy rates in XYZ city.” You need to then research evidence-based approaches that have been used to address teen pregnancy prevention. These might be from peer-reviewed articles; “gray” literature from poster presentations or “promising practice” sections from conferences or professional organizations; or a program report from a health department. You might find two, alternative evidence-based solutions to address this need: (Option 1) a comprehensive sexual health and education curriculum and approach, or (Option 2) a holistic positive youth development, life skills planning, and leadership training curriculum and approach. Thinking about your agency and the community it serves, you might decide that Option 2 (the holistic approach) is best suited to address the need related to high teen pregnancy rate. This might be because the agency sits in a community-wide family resource center that broadly addresses community needs, so a more holistic approach is feasible and is aligned with the agency organizational culture. This is what you would say as the justification for choosing this type of approach as you move into designing your program intervention. Another approach given this scenario is that you might combine elements from each evidence-based intervention you researched. So, you might decide to primarily implement Option 2 (the holistic approach), but that you also feel the curriculum from Option 1 (comprehensive sexual health education) would be a good fit for the agency and then will plan to add that to the program intervention that you design. You have flexibility to implement one strategy “as-is” or to combine more than one strategy together or to incorporate parts of alternative strategies together for your intervention. Regardless of what you choose to do, you must discuss why you selected the strategy and support/justify why it is the best fit/best option to address the identified need in your agency.