Behavioral Health Services of South Georgia Strategic Prevention Framework - Partnerships for Success for Communities, Local Governments, Universities, Colleges, and Tribes. - Serving a predominantly rural 10-county area from its Lowndes County hub, Legacy Behavioral Health Services (LBHS), the largest public safety net provider in South Georgia, proposes to strengthen partnerships to collaboratively establish an enduring infrastructure focused on substance misuse prevention for children. LBHS currently delivers person-centered, evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery services and pursues this opportunity to deepen its capacity, reduce prevalence of misuse, and achieve improved behavioral health outcomes. We propose two goals: 1) Increase school and community-based prevention activities for children in grades 6-12 in Lowndes County, and 2) Increase focused partnerships and community awareness of underage drug and alcohol use. Our goals and objectives are geared to address indicators of need such as 20% of students (grades 6-12) reporting alcohol use before age 9 while 9% currently use alcohol and up to 7.9% are using marijuana, and there is a lack of current prevention activities. The rural nature of the area provides too much unstructured time and we can increase community awareness on student substance use. We are partnering with key local and statewide partners including our local school systems, pediatric physician practices, government and criminal justice organizations, community youth service providers, and faith-based organizations to address population health improvements through EBP prevention programs (e.g., All Stars Core, Project Alert, Prevention Plus Wellness, and evidence-informed Cannabis/ Marijuana Awareness and Prevention Toolkit) and modification to environmental factors. Our partners will come together in a Strategic Prevention Steering Committee (SPSC) and a Youth Leaders Council, providing vehicles for developing and implementing strategies, promoting education and awareness, and garnering community buy-in. LBHS has designed an achievable approach with a timeline that stages assessment, capacity building, planning, implementation, and evaluation with reasonable cadence and considering dependencies. Already actively engaged in providing direct behavioral health support to students and schools through the local Apex Program, LBHS will build out prevention programming through these existing school relationships and with new and strengthened community partnerships. We aim to develop and distribute materials for school personnel to facilitate identifying at-risk children; develop educational materials for parents and caregivers and distribute to all public-school middle school parents annually; increase attendance in EBP prevention activities by 20% in applicable middle schools; expand school prevention activities in middle and high schools by 40%; and identify and modify one environmental factor the community can change by the end of Year 2. This will create the foundational model for eventual cascading to the full 10-county area. LBHS’s strong Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) infrastructure, use of the ASPIRE to Excellence® Quality Framework, and Plan-Do-Study-Act CQI methods will be customized to the strategic prevention framework to track implemented interventions and the capacity of our community partners to engage in the process. Leveraging the SPSC to refine the measures that will describe our impact as well as to provide regular monitoring, we will evaluate measures specific to EBPs, goals and associated objective, and operational processes, the latter to identify process improvements. We will design and create a project-specific information system-based database for collection of related data and reporting including sufficient delineation of data characteristics to report out Disparity Impact Statements annually. We will review the selected measures annually as a formal project activity and internally at least quarterly, more routinely monthly.
