Clinical Implementation and Evaluation for the Family-oriented Care CHIMPS-NET

Overview

Despite the knowledge, that children of mentally ill parents are an important target group to be addressed by preventive and therapeutical interventions, there is often a lack of structured implementation of family-oriented interventions in clinical practice in Germany. Using a randomized controlled multicenter trial design with a large and wide-ranging sample (clinics for adult psychiatry and clinics for child and adolescent psychiatry, university clinics and clinics at the real health care) will examine changes in family-oriented practice and aspects of implementation to get a robust understanding of implementing family-oriented interventions in German clinical practice.

A two-group randomized controlled multicenter trial will examine changes in family-oriented practice and aspects of implementation at baseline as well as at 12- and 24-months follow-up. The CHIMPS-Network consists of twenty clinical centers. The centers in the intervention group receive the support of all of the three implementation interventions: 1) Optimal pathways to care 2) Education and a training program for professionals and 3) Systematic screening for children. The centers in the control group do not get this specific implementation support. The implementation of all the CHIMPS interventions refers to and builds on a theoretical model developed by researchers from Australia and Norway, adapted to the German care system setting including adult psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. In ci-CHIMPS we aim to determine if three implementation interventions are helpful in improving the clinical implementation of the CHIMPS-NET interventions. Additionally, we want to identify factors hindering or promoting implementation processes. In order to monitor the impact of the three implementation interventions we will use the translated version of the "Family Focused Mental Health Practice Questionnaire (FFMHPQ)" (Laser et al., 2019, in prep.) and the translated version of the "Implementation Components Questionnaire (ICQ)" (Laser, Skogøy, Maybery \& Wiegand-Grefe, 2019. in prep). The introduction of these questionnaires in Germany has not yet been reported.