CURRENT PROJECTS

Parent Empowerment Program Project - Utah

Partners:

7 Intermountain Healthcare Clinics

Project Description

This project, formally titled “Increasing Doctor-Parent-Teacher Communication and Parents’ ‘Commitment to Treatment’ in the Management of ADHD”, is a collaboration between REACH and Intermountain Healthcare (IHC), a Utah-based HMO.  The goal of the project is to enhance parent-provider and parent-teacher communication towards the delivery of high quality care to children with ADHD.  To achieve this goal newly diagnosed children with ADHD will be randomly assigned to receive either “Standard Care” according to IHC physicians’ standard practices, or a second approach which supplements Standard Care (Standard Care PLUS) with two quality enhancement tools.  The first tool, the Parent-Professional Empowered Partnerships Program (PEP), offers the family the assistance of a trained Parent Advocate who can assist the family in identifying school- and community-based resources for children with ADHD.  The second tool is the Parent-Educator-Provider Communication Tool:  The Star Game Card, a simple fun-to-use checklist that details some of the important aspects of quality care.  The Star Game Card includes objectives and activities that need to be accomplished by the doctor, parent, teacher, and child to increase the likelihood of treatment adherence, careful monitoring of the child’s progress, and improved outcomes. 

The use of these tools is expected to increase compliance with treatment and we will test a model of how parents intentions to perform certain behaviors related to treatment of children with ADHD are translated into actions.  Thus, this study will allow REACH and its partners at Intermountain Healthcare to simultaneously examine actual service use in relation to the specialized tools and the factors that contribute to parents’ individual behavior change.