2024 · Book chapter · English
Communities That Care (Chapter 7, Economic Evaluation of Interventions for Children with Mental Health Needs)
Eisenberg, D., & Raghavan, R.
Eisenberg, D., & Raghavan, R. (2024). Communities That Care (Chapter 7, Economic Evaluation of Interventions for Children with Mental Health Needs). In Investing in children's mental health (pp. 102–113). Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190942014.003.0008
Summary
Chapter 7 of Investing in Children's Mental Health, a book on the economic evaluation of interventions for children with mental health needs, closes the volume's case studies with Communities That Care. Unlike the specific interventions examined in the other chapters, CTC is a framework for building the community-wide infrastructure that lets many interventions take root: in the authors' gardening image, individual programmes are seeds and CTC is the soil, which needs its own careful preparation. The chapter sets out CTC's road map for that preparation, from community-led problem identification and coalition building through local data collection and outcome tracking to collaboration with external knowledge brokers and community ownership of programme choice and results. It argues that collective action of this kind can produce impressive and durable results and places CTC within the book's economic framework, giving European decision-makers a concise account of why a prevention system, rather than a single programme, may be the better investment.