June 6-12, 2022

Older Korean immigrants face isolation and limited healthcare access

Bay News 9

"USF Associate Professor Dr. Nan Sook Park has been researching the issue in older Korean immigrants for more than a decade. First, for a joint project..."

Students Baker Acted and parents not notified

WFOX (FOX) - Jacksonville

"According to the most recent report by the University of South Florida, the Baker Act was used more than 37,000 times on children in fiscal year, 2018-19..."

Profiles of these mass shooters

WLFA-AM (Radio)

"Joining us, we have associate professor of criminology at USF Dr Bryanna Fox. She's a nationally renowned expert on behavioral analysis and profiling..."

Conner, K. O., Wiltshire, J., Garcia, E. C., Langland-Orban, B., Anderson, E., Carrion, I., Goodman, A., & Goodman, A. (2022). Racial and ethnic differences in cost-of-care conversations among older adults. Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 1–11. doi:10.1080/17538068.2022.2072165 

Principal Investigator: Amy Vargo, PhD (CFS)

Co-Principal Investigator: Pamela Menendez (CFS)

Evaluation of Implementation to Fidelity of Evidence-Based Services

Sponsor: Florida Department of Children and Families

5/17/2022-6/30/2024

Amount: $1,600,000

The Families First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA, 2018) reforms child welfare financing streams to provide prevention services to families who are at risk of entering the child welfare system; allows for federal reimbursement for community mental health, substance use treatment, and in-home parenting skills training; and seeks to improve the well-being of children already in foster care by incentivizing states to reduce placement of children in congregate care. In order to meet these changes, states and local areas must be prepared to implement programs and practices that have been determined by the FFPSA Clearinghouse to be either well-supported, supported, or promising.

Florida has selected eight evidence-based practices (EBPs) to implement during the initial transition to FFPSA: Motivational Interviewing, Multisystemic Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, Parent Child Interaction Therapy, Healthy Family Florida, Brief Strategic Family Therapy, Nurse Family Partnerships, and Parents as Teachers. All eight of these practices have been reviewed by the FFPSA Clearinghouse and evaluated as ‘well-supported’ practices, however, the State must evaluate and document that these practices have been implemented with fidelity to their program models and are achieving their intended outcomes. Furthermore, the State has conducted a review of existing practices and identified two additional practices that are not currently on the Clearinghouse and will require a rigorous evaluation using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) or quasi-experimental design to meet Clearinghouse standards.

In response to the current and anticipated evaluation needs of the State, we have assembled a diverse team of researchers with extensive expertise in designing evaluation research studies, implementation science, and evaluation of evidence-based and promising practices, as well as a long history of relationships with organizations throughout Florida’s child welfare system. The USF team is located in the Department of Child and Family Studies (CFS) – Division of Child and Family Behavioral Health (CFBH), and the School of Social Work, both situated in the College of Behavioral and Community Sciences. USF will be subcontracting with the Health Services Research Institute (HSRI) to form a research-to-practice partnership. The team will build on their collective depth of experience in systems change efforts to provide comprehensive, mixed methods evaluation of fidelity to EBP’s (process, fidelity, and outcomes), create a CQI system for collection of data for analysis, and responsive technical assistance (TA) plan for meeting challenges identified. This partnership will actively collaborate with DCF, Regional and CBC leadership, Subject Matter Experts, Universities and providers responsible for the training and implementation of the selected EBPs, and other key stakeholders in order to promote optimal development, implementation, and sustainability effort to support Florida’s Families First prevention plan.