Dallas County Mental Health Service Delivery System for Children, Youth, and Families

This in-depth assessment of Dallas County’s mental health service delivery systems for children, youth, and families was conducted in partnership with The Rees-Jones Foundation. The goals of this assessment were to inventory and analyze Dallas County’s mental health systems, assess their current and potential capacity to deliver care along a continuum that provides highly responsive and clinically effective services, and offer specific recommendations to support the continued development of the system. The assessment, therefore, focuses on the scope and quality of services within Dallas County through the lens of MMHPI’s Mental Health Systems Framework for Children and Youth (framework), which has five components that are described more fully in the report and used to organize the findings and recommendations:

• Component 0: Life in the Community
• Component 1: Integrated Primary Care
• Component 2: Specialty Outpatient Care
• Component 3: Specialty Rehabilitative Care
• Component 4: Crisis Care

Using this framework as a foundation, this report describes a range of best practices for each component, focusing on research-based practices and interventions that have been proven to have the best outcomes for children, youth, and their families. These best practices have proven to be effective across demographics, populations, and clinical settings.

Although we recognize the efforts of these formal systems to provide and coordinate access to effective mental health services, we also recognize that the complexity of these systems, along with their limited capacities, create additional challenges for the children, youth, and families who receive their services. This report provides guidance on strategies to improve access to the most effective mental health services in the right place and at the right time for Dallas County children, youth, and their families.