NCT04383327

School-Based Mental Health Effectiveness Study

Effectiveness and Implementation of an Early Childhood School-Based Mental Health Intervention in Low-Resource Communities

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 2,444 (actual)
• Sponsor: NYU Langone Health · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study involves efforts to advance the science of prevention in early childhood mental health in low-resource communities. Investigators will assess the effectiveness, practical implementation strategies, and underlying mechanisms of the evidence-based intervention, ParentCorps-Professional Development, in urban and rural Uganda. Two implementation approaches, with and without the teacher stress management package, T-Wellness, will be compared for efficacy.

Detailed description

Promoting child mental health in low-resource or low-income country settings faces numerous challenges in global health research. Although efforts have been made to improve mental health interventions and services for young children, evidence-based interventions (EBIs) for children in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) are limited. Most mental health EBIs in LMICs have not been scaled widely, and do not focus on early childhood. Mechanisms of action and effectiveness are not well understood. Additionally, most EBIs in LMICs rely on community health workers (CHWs) or a task-shifting approach of implementation because of resource barriers and shortage of mental health professionals (MHPs). However, challenges related to task-shifting (e.g., CHW stress and job burnout) have rarely been studied. For task-shifting to be successful, strategies to overcome challenges faced by CHWs and understanding mechanisms to conduct effective task-shifting are paramount. The overall goal of this study is to address these EBI effectiveness and implementation knowledge gaps by providing a preventive EBI (ParentCorps-Professional Development; PD) that utilizes a task-shifting and a scalable implementation model to promote early childhood students' mental health in a LMIC-Uganda. PD is a school-based EBI and preventive mental health service provision model that supports teachers and school personnel to apply EBI strategies to promote young children's mental health. The PD approach represents a task-shifting model of mental healthcare by shifting mental health preventive duties from professionals to teachers to optimize school children's mental health. Therefore, teachers are considered as CHWs. This study examines impacts and cost-effectiveness of the EBI/PD on teachers and students, as well as examines underlying mechanisms (or theories of change) that contribute to intervention effect. In addition, considering most Ugandan teachers (or CHWs) experience occupational stress that threatens PD uptake, effectiveness, and sustainment, this study will also test a teacher stress management package (T-Wellness, adapted from EBIs) as an enhancement to PD. This study will investigate whether PD + T-Wellness (PDT) is more effective for CHWs/teachers than PD alone.

Conditions

• Child Development

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	ParentCorps-Professional Development (PD)	Multi-component school-based intervention that promotes early childhood mental health and development. Teachers (pre-primary to 4th grade) will participate in a 3-day ParentCorps-PD training during the school term. They will also receive 8 sessions (8 hours) of face-to-face group-based coaching during after the training. Coaching sessions are to help teachers apply EBI strategies in their classrooms, engage families, and develop competencies.
BEHAVIORAL	T-Wellness	A brief teacher stress management psychoeducation package, adapted from EBIs including one-day workshop for common stress management and stress management, and three follow-up group support sessions (3 additional monthly 1-hr wellness sessions for teachers as a group that were integrated into the 3 of the 8 PD coaching sessions. A total 3 hours of coaching were included.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-08-01
• Primary completion: 2024-06-30
• Completion: 2025-02-28
• First posted: 2020-05-12
• Last updated: 2025-08-08
• Results posted: 2025-08-08

Locations

2 sites across 1 country: Uganda