The highly regarded Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has announced that CTI meets the Congressional Top Tier evidence standard as an effective social program. This standard, identified in recent legislative language, is “well-designed randomized controlled trials [showing] sizeable, sustained effects on important…outcomes.” The Coalition is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works closely with key Executive Branch and Congressional officials to help promote dissemination of the most promising social interventions.
Investigators from four countries gathered on September 22 to describe their current research at a symposium held at the World Congress of Psychiatry in Buenos Aries, Argentina, sponsored by the World Psychiatric Association. Participants included Dan Herman (US), Ezra Susser (US), Graham Thornicroft (UK), Elie Valencia (Brazil), Judith Wolff (Netherlands). Thornicroft and colleagues are conducting a randomized trial of CTI with persons with mental illness being released from correctional facilities in London and Manchester, while Valencia reported on work his group is carrying out using CTI in the favelas of Rio De Janeiro. Wolff leads a large multi-site randomized trial testing an adapted version of the model with homeless persons and women who have experienced interpersonal violence.
The Center for Social Innovation, Inc., has announced that the next offering of its intensive, instructor-led online course will run between February 6 and March 26th, 2012. Bringing together national CTI experts, a team-based learning approach, and engaging multi-media technology, the course provides agencies with the tools needed to implement CTI in their organization. Download details and contact information here.
Psychiatric Services has published the findings of the most recent randomized trial of CTI with people with severe mental illness following discharge from psychiatric hospitals. 150 previously homeless men and women with severe mental illness and who were discharged from inpatient psychiatric hospitalization to transitional residences on the hospital grounds were randomly assigned to receive usual care or usual care plus CTI at the point of discharge to the community. Following discharge, participants’ housing status was assessed every six weeks for 18 months. An intent-to-treat analysis demonstrated that participants assigned to the CTI group had significantly less homelessness at the end of the follow-up period, supporting the idea that a targeted, relatively short intervention applied at a critical transition point can enhance the efficacy of long-term supports for persons with severe mental illness who are living in the community. A free full-text version of the article is available here.
The Supportive Services for Veteran Families Program is a new VA program that will award grants to private non-profit organizations and consumer cooperatives who will provide supportive services to very low-income veterans and their families residing in or transitioning to permanent housing. Organizations will receive grants to provide a range of supportive services, including CTI, designed to promote housing stability.
SAMHSA’s Center for Mental Health Services has awarded five-year grants to providers in three states to implement CTI as part of its 2010 Mental Health Systems Transformation grant program. Awardees are the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare; the County of Lake, Illinois; and the City of St. Louis (MO) Mental Health Board.
The Conrad Hilton Foundation has announced $13 million in grants to support a five-year drive to end chronic homelessness in Los Angeles. The multi-faceted initiative includes funds for a range of new housing and service programs. Included among them is a $330,000 grant to the Downtown Women’s Center to help 80 chronically homeless women effectively transition into permanent housing. This will be the first application of CTI in Los Angeles, a city with one of the largest populations of homeless persons in the United States.
The Netherlands Center for Social Care Research at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, with funding from the national government, has launched two randomized controlled trials to assess the effectiveness of CTI in Dutch services for homeless people and victims of domestic violence. The studies investigate whether combining Critical Time Intervention (CTI) with the typical strengths-based social work approach is more effective than the strengths-based methodology alone in improving housing and other outcomes. The homeless sector trial will include adult clients of 9 shelters, examining whether CTI leads to fewer days of homelessness (primary outcome measure). The trial in the women’s shelter sector targets adult female clients of 8 facilities who have experienced violent abuse and examines how CTI affects their quality of life (primary outcome measure). Teams have been trained in the interventions and data collection is set to begin shortly. The study is led by Dr. Judith Wolf with collaborators Renee de Vet, Danielle Lako, and Marielle Beijersbergen. A kickoff meeting (see photo), held on November 18 in Utrecht, was attended by service providers, researchers and CTI experts from the Netherlands and the US including Dan Herman of Columbia University.
The Center for Social Innovation, in partnership with Center for Urban Community Services and researchers at Columbia University, has received additional funding from NIMH to further develop and test a web-based CTI training and implementation support model for social workers and other staff working with homeless persons. This follows a successful pilot effort carried out last year. Bringing together experts in CTI training and dissemination, adult and team-based learning theories and multi-media technology, this second phase of the project will complete development of the web-based training product and then evaluate it by comparing its effectiveness with a traditional face-to-face approach.
