Psychology week 7 assignment

Narrative Explanation (Tides Family Services Logic Model)

Barbara Maclure

Dr. Kelly

11/02/2025

Assumptions made

The logic model outlines Clinical and Enhanced Outpatient Services (EOS) at Tides Family Services, which is a home-based, intensive, short-term counselling Programme of youth aged 9 to 18 years whose stated objective is to prevent hospitalization. Since the description provided by the population does not specify evaluation procedures but enumerates the services, some justifiable assumptions had to be made. To begin with, it is presumed that the EOS clinicians will utilize the Patient Health Questionnaire for Adolescents (PHQ-A) both upon intake and prior to discharge due to the brevity, free nature, and the widespread application of the tool in community mental-health facilities (Tides Family Services, 2025). Second, the assumption is that the visits, crisis response, and care-coordination contacts are recorded in the agency record system, as the programme is funded by Neighborhood Health Plan of Rhode Island and payers need to be reported on encounters (Fink, 2024). Third, the assumption made on caseloads is that it allows one or two visits per week and the duration will be six to twelve weeks which is equivalent to the term short term intensive services.

Alignment with PHQ-A

The results were based on PHQ-A instructions given by Cheung, (2025) and adolescent validation given by LaLonde, (2022). Short-term outcomes will ensure that screening occurred and that the scores decreased by five points which is an initial clinical response. Medium-term outcomes state that PHQ-A should be less than 10 or by 50 percent, which are widely recognized clinically meaningful improvement thresholds. These symptom changes are accompanied by fewer crisis uses because EOS strives to ensure that young people do not spend time in hospital.

Missing information

The site fails to provide the EOS visit frequency, average episodes length, staff-to-youth ratios, crisis-diversion rates, or the screening schedule with which the clinicians work. The presence of those figures would enable the starred assumptions within the logic model to be substituted by verifiable targets and would enable disaggregation by age, gender, referral source, and school involvement.

References

Cheung, R. Y. (2025). Patient health questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). In Handbook of assessment in mindfulness research (p. 1837-1848). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Fink, A. (2024). Program Evaluation: A Primer for Effectiveness, Quality, and Value (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032367873

LaLonde, L. R. (2022). Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) as a Tool for Screening and Monitoring Adolescent Depression in Pediatric Primary Care: An Item-Level Analysis (Doctoral dissertation, Eastern Michigan University).

Tides Family Services. (2025, September 17). Home. https://www.tidesfs.org/