Collaborative Redesign of Implementation Strategies for the Brief Intervention for School Clinicians

Schools are the most common venue for youth mental health services, but school mental health (SMH) typically does not use evidence-based clinical interventions (CI), common elements of effective mental health, or effective implementation strategies. To address this gap, a multidisciplinary team developed the Brief Intervention for School Clinicians (BRISC), a four-session engagement, brief intervention, and triage strategy targeting a range of mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression, past trauma) and other problems (academic, peer, family). BRISC outperformed SMH usual care on engagement, treatment completion, and youth self-reported problem severity. Although there are many evidence-based SMH strategies such as BRISC, integration into practice is poor because accompanying implementation strategies are often absent, poorly defined, or insufficiently tailored to the education context.

The investigators will evaluate the impact of original BRISC (BR-O) implementation versus adapted BRISC (BR-A) implementation for students referred to SMH on mental health outcomes (i.e., student top problems, anxiety, depression, mental health functioning). The investigators hypothesize: H-1: In both BR-O and BR-A, more students will experience clinical improvement on mental health outcomes (i.e., top problems, anxiety, depression, mental health functioning) than deteriorate or remain unchanged. H-2: BR-A will demonstrate noninferiority to BR-O on mental health outcomes.