Rationale, Development, and Description of a Brief Family-Centered Service Provision Model for Addressing Children’s Severe Behavior

ABSTRACT

For families with children with autism that engage in severe behavior, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that functional assessment and management of environmental variables contributing to severe behavior occur prior to the prescription of psychopharmacologic treatment. Despite the inclusion of this recommendation in guidance articles published in pediatric journals for more than a decade, access to such services may not be feasible, in particular for families living in rural and geographically isolated communities. Given that families often view pediatricians as their first line of professional guidance for addressing challenges surrounding child development, the inaccessibility of appropriate services for managing healthcare is a concern for many pediatricians. To address this issue, a brief family-centered service provision model was developed through a collaboration between healthcare providers at a university-based hospital and Applied Behavior Analysis program faculty of the affiliated university. The hospital served many families living in rural areas of the state; therefore, the model utilized research-based practices with evidence of ecological validity for providing function-based assessment and treatment services. Within this manuscript we present a description of the model and its current implementation at a university-based hospital. For a data-based evaluation of the clinic and model, we refer readers to https://osf.io/qx8ak.

KEYWORDS:

• Severe behavior
• community-based services
• developmental disability
• autism
• family-centered
• program description

Conflicts of interest

All authors were involved in or currently oversee various aspects of the out-patient clinic described in this manuscript.

Ethical approval

This manuscript does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Data included as supplemental materials were approved by a university Institutional Review Board as meeting criteria as a Quality Improvement Project.

Additional information

Funding

There is no funding to declare for this article.