Remote School-Home Program to Improve Youth Attention and Behavior in Mexican Students

Plain-language summary

Neurodevelopmental disorders of inattention and disruptive behavior, such as Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), are among the most common youth mental health conditions across cultures. An efficacious and feasible solution to improving affected youth's ADHD/ODD is training existing school clinicians to deliver evidence-based intervention with fidelity. Despite initial promising results of training school clinicians to treat ADHD/ODD in settings suffering from high unmet need, such as Mexico, scalability is limited by a lack of researchers with capacity to train, monitor, and evaluate school clinicians in such efforts on a large scale. Thus, there is a need to develop more feasible interventions and training programs for school clinicians, as well as create a system with capacity for scalable training and evaluation, to combat the widespread impact ofADHD/ODD worldwide. Converting interventions and school clinician professional development programs for fully-remote delivery allows for more flexibility, accessibility, affordability, scalability, and promise for ongoing consultation than in-person options. Supporting scalable training for school clinicians could address a significant public health concern in Mexico, as only 14% of Mexican youth with mental health disorders receive treatment and less than half of those treated receive more than minimally adequate care. The study team is uniquely suited for this effort, given that they developed the only known school-home ADHD/ODD evidence-based intervention in Latin America-and-have developed a web-based training for U.S. school clinicians with promising preliminary results. The study team's prior studies and high levels of unmet need make Mexico an ideal location for this proposal; however, lessons learned could be used to expand scalable school clinician training for evidence-based intervention in other settings and/or for other disorders. Thus, this study focuses on comparing the fully-remote CLS-R-FUERTE program vs. care-as-usual in an 8-school clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT). The team predicts: 1) school clinicians trained in the remote program will be satisfied and show improved skills, 2) parents, youth, and teachers treated by school clinicians in the remote program will engage/adhere, and 3) youth in the remote program will show more ADHD/ODD improvements compared to care-as-usual

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