Evidence registers

The step that needs a register

The fourth phase of CTC asks a community to choose interventions that match the risk and protective factors it has prioritised. That choice is only as good as the menu it is chosen from. A register of prevention programmes, each reviewed against explicit standards of evidence, is what makes the step possible, and it is the piece of infrastructure most European countries lack.

Xchange: the European register

Xchange is the prevention registry of the European Union Drugs Agency in Lisbon. It lists interventions that have been evaluated in Europe, with a rating of the evidence, information on where they have been implemented, and contact details for the programme owners.

Xchange is also, in a direct sense, the register that CTC built. Between 2013 and 2015 the CTC European Network project set out to identify prevention and early-intervention programmes that had been tested in Europe by randomised or quasi-experimental evaluation. The Dartington Social Research Unit in the UK reviewed each candidate against the standards of evidence used by Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development: intervention specificity, evaluation quality, intervention impact and system readiness. The results were classified for effectiveness in a European context and published into Xchange. The project's report, What works in Europe, describes the process and is available here as a PDF (17 May 2016), together with the European CTC Implementation Guide from the same project.

For a European community running CTC, Xchange is therefore the natural first stop: it was designed for exactly this use.

National registers

Several countries maintain their own registers, usually with a broader remit than Xchange and with programmes adapted to the national system. Where one exists, it belongs alongside Xchange in phase four.

• Germany: the Grüne Liste Prävention, maintained by the Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony, rates programmes in three evidence tiers and is the register the German CTC process is built around. German only.
• Netherlands: the Databank Effectieve Jeugdinterventies of the Netherlands Youth Institute, one of the oldest and most thorough registers in Europe; it grew out of the programme inventory the Dutch CTC pilots needed in 2000. Dutch only.
• Sweden: the Metodguiden of the National Board of Health and Welfare, covering methods used in social services. Swedish only.
• United Kingdom: the Foundations Guidebook, formerly the Early Intervention Foundation Guidebook, rates interventions for children and families from ‘not yet level 2’ to level 4, with plus grades. English.
• Ireland: the What Works Ireland Evidence Hub of the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, which takes its entries and ratings from the Foundations Guidebook and has had a handful of Irish programmes assessed by Foundations against the same standards. English.
• Poland: the System rekomendacji programów profilaktycznych i promocji zdrowia psychicznego (programyrekomendowane.pl), run by the National Centre for Addiction Prevention together with the Centre for Education Development and the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, rates prevention and mental-health promotion programmes at three levels. CTC has not yet been implemented in Poland, but the register exists and would be ready for phase four. Polish only.

A note on what these registers do not contain: none of the European or national registers lists Communities That Care itself, and Blueprints rates it as Promising, as a system rather than a programme. Registers rate discrete, manualised interventions; CTC is the operating system that selects and installs such interventions, so its own evidence is presented on the evidence page instead.

Blueprints: where the standard comes from

Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the US register that CTC grew up alongside, and the one whose standards of evidence the European review adopted. It remains the most demanding register in the field: programmes reach its top tier only with at least one high-quality randomised trial plus an independent replication. Many Blueprints programmes have no European adaptation or licence holder, so it is a reference for standards more than a shopping list, but a European community that wants to know what the strongest available evidence looks like should read it.

If your country has no register

Use Xchange, and use the national registers of neighbouring countries whose systems resemble yours: Dutch and German programmes have often been adapted across the border. Then document what you chose and why. A community that records its selection reasoning has already begun building the register its country lacks.