Session: Scaling Evidence-Based Interventions: Sustainability, Feasibility, and Fidelity (Society for Prevention Research 27th Annual Meeting)

The theme of this symposium is about increasing access to evidence based programs, especially to young children. Each program’s developer and dissemination staff have been working to scale up the programs to increase access, with a careful focus on implementing the interventions in a feasible way while still maintaining core essence of the interventions. The goal of all these scaling efforts is to maintain treatment quality even as intervention scale increases.

Each paper addresses this topic from a different angle: One paper will focus on a method for training new supervisors to monitor clinician fidelity to an intervention, one will focus on improving the process for training coaches through on-line distance learning modules, and one will focus on increasing the reach of an intervention by piloting a method for directly reaching clients through an internet adaptation of the intervention.

More specifically, the first paper discusses the process for training off-site fidelity supervisors for a parenting intervention to improve attachment and self-regulation in infants. To make the intervention more scalable and sustainable, it is necessary to have community supervisors who can monitor clinician’s fidelity so that the model is implemented in its most efficacious form.

The second paper discusses a plan to provide professional development supports to help child-care teachers effectively deliver an evidence-based preschool enrichment program, making the program more sustainable by getting directors to serve as coaches for their teachers.

The third paper focuses on an empirically-supported media-enhanced home visiting program that uses an internet adaptation to remotely deliver the intervention to economically disadvantaged families to strengthen early parenting behaviors that promote infant social communication.

Our discussant has experience in early intervention, and has worked on both home-visiting based programs and programs that support school readiness for vulnerable children.

This symposium would present varied perspectives on how to reach vulnerable children and families. We believe that combining this set of interventions gives the audience a unique view into each program’s creative solution to increase access and bring infants and toddlers high-quality interventions the way they were intended to be delivered. We share a goal of making these programs to be feasible to implement, in terms of cost and staff, while also retaining the large effect sizes seen in the initial RCTs. All papers focus on the quality of program delivery and continued efficacy of programs disseminated, even as we try to find ways to expand the reach of each intervention.