“During the past two decades, there has been an increasing emphasis on the development of community-based, integrated systems of care to serve children with serious emotional disturbances and their families. Systems of care are based on the understanding that children with serious emotional disturbances have a wide variety of strengths and needs; thus, their services should be individualized, or tailored to the strengths and needs of the child and family. The individualized service plans, jointly developed by the family and the agencies involved with them, is a major underpinning of an integrated system of care. However, implementing such plans requires that a wide array of services be available to meet the individual needs of each child and family in the community system. Efforts to establish a wide array of services involve developing or expanding both traditional mental health services and non-traditional services that can be “wrapped” around the child and family. As a result, considerable attention has been devoted to individualized service planning and to creating a wide range of services. Recently, attention has been directed toward understanding the mechanisms for establishing and maintaining an array of effective and responsive services—while including other systems of care values such as providing choice for families and referring practitioners, and maximizing accountability.”
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