Responses

Good Afternoon Class,

The objective I chose form the Healthy People Website 2023 was “Children with Mental Health problems receiving treatment”.  ( Increase the Proportion of Children with Mental Health Problems Who Get Treatment — Data Methodology and Measurement - Healthy People 2030 | Health.gov, n.d.)  Utilizing the most recent data from 2019 shows the baseline of 70.7 percent of children between the ages of 4-17 with mental health issue received treatment.  The target percentage is 70.3% The target setting method was calculated using Cohen’s h effect size of 0.2.  “In statistics, Cohen’s   h, popularized by  Jacob Cohen, is a measure of distance between two proportions or  probabilities.” (Wikipedia Contributors, 2017) The Healthy People 2030 experts believed this to be a reasonable target due to the national resources that were being implemented to improve children’s mental health.

            The journal article I selected was “Is minimally adequate treatment really adequate? Investigating the effect of mental health treatment on quality of life for children with mental health problems” (Ride et al., 2020)The purpose of this study was to determine if children between the ages of 8-15 who received MAT (minimally adequate treatment) in the way of mental health gained any significant improvement. With a sample that consisted of 596 children using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) which was completed by the children’s parents.  Results showed that minimally adequate treatment (MAT) for mental health in children had no statistically significant improvement or have better outcomes.

In comparison to the Health People Objective, it questions that even with the increase of treatment received by children for mental health is this treatment effective.  Treatment can be increased and still have no beneficial effects for the children.  In this case, more treatment is not healthier.  I would use this information to concentrate on the quality of mental health resources that are being presented to children not just quantity.

 

 Reference

Increase the proportion of children with mental health problems who get treatment — Data Methodology and Measurement - Healthy People 2030 | health.gov. (n.d.). Health.gov.  https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/browse-objectives/mental-health-and-mental-disorders/increase-proportion-children-mental-health-problems-who-get-treatment-mhmd-03/data-methodology

 

Ride, J., Huang, L., Mulraney, M., Hiscock, H., Coghill, D., Sawyer, M., Sciberras, E., & Dalziel, K. (2020). Is “minimally adequate treatment” really adequate? investigating the effect of mental health treatment on quality of life for children with mental health problems..  Journal of Affective Disorders,  276, 327–334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.07.086

 

Wikipedia Contributors. (2017, February 19).  Cohen’s h. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen%27s_h