Jp. Morrissey et al., EVALUATING PERFORMANCE AND CHANGE IN MENTAL-HEALTH SYSTEMS SERVING CHILDREN AND YOUTH - AN INTERORGANIZATIONAL NETWORK APPROACH, Journal of mental health administration, 24(1), 1997, pp. 4-22
Planning for the delivery of community mental health services has evol
ved from models of services within individual agencies to community-wi
de systems of care, but development of methodologies for assessing sys
tem performance has lagged behind. This article presents one approach
to system-level assessment by viewing children's mental health systems
as an interorganizational network. Data are presented on two county-b
ased child mental health systems in North Carolina that participated i
n the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Mental Health Services Program fo
r Youth. Site-specific data on client referrals, fund exchanges, and i
nformation flows were collected at two rime points (1991 and 1993) to
measure the cohesiveness and concentration of the service system using
networkk-core analyses. In addition, stakeholder ratings of service a
dequacy, quality, availability, coordination, and overall demonstratio
n project goal attainment were obtained at both time periods. Findings
indicate that the rural system was outperforming the urban system at
the time of the first survey but the urban system caught rep over the
study interval. There was high agreement between the network and stake
holder ratings of system performance at both time periods. The method
of data collection and analysis used in this study provides tools that
can be used in a variety of settings to assess service system growth
and development.