Oregon Supplement: Supporting Sustainable Positive Interactions in the Child Welfare System: The R3 Supervisor Strategy

Oregon Social Learning Center

Status: Completed

Conditions: Evidence-Based Practice

Treatments: Behavioral: R3

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other; NIH

Identifiers

NCT05475457

R01DA040416 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

R01DA040416-S1

Details and patient eligibility

About

This administrative supplement capitalized on the preliminary positive outcomes from the primary parent grant award (R01DA040416), and lessons learned from the implementation of the R3 Supervisor Strategy (R3) throughout the participating four regions (12 counties) in Tennessee. This project aimed to pilot the implementation of R3 with a new sample, a cohort of counties in Oregon particularly affected by the current opioid epidemic, for potential scale-up.

Full description

Oregon currently is experiencing a crisis within its Child Welfare System (CWS), with combined challenges within the workforce and departmental support, and a staggering rise in referrals for parental substance abuse. The R3 Supervisor Strategy (R3) provides training, consultation, and fidelity-monitoring to supervisors in the CWS, who are centrally positioned between caseworkers (who have daily interactions with CWS-involved families) and leadership (who make decisions that affect the organization in which families receive services). Supervisors are trained to implement key reinforcement strategies that make up the three Rs including reinforcement of (1) effort, (2) relationships and roles, and (3) small steps toward goal achievement. R3 is relatively easy to learn and sustain and has demonstrated promise in improving CWS outcomes in the parent grant award (R01DA040416). Because many of the counties most impacted by the opioid crisis are rural and under-resourced, an approach like R3 provides the opportunity to introduce evidence-based strategies to these regions where it otherwise is not feasible to adopt more intensive services. This study utilized the same Hybrid Type II design as its parent grant in which supervisors and caseworkers from two Oregon counties particularly affected by the substance abuse crisis were recruited to to provide a pilot assessment of the effectiveness of R3 with an emphasis on referrals for opioid and methamphetamine use (Aim 1). In doing so, the study also sought to modify the R3 training materials to emphasize examples of working with families referred for parental substance abuse (Aim 2) and replicate the preliminary findings from the parent grant, providing pilot data for a larger state scale-up of R3. This administrative supplement allowed an initial assessment to identify if R3's strategies are profound enough to impact the most challenging systems, faced with the most challenging public health crisis presented currently-the impact of the opioid epidemic on families.

Enrollment: 404 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Oregon Child welfare workforce employee in a participating county.

Exclusion criteria

• Contract Workers

Trial design

404 participants in 2 patient groups

Oregon County 1

Description:

First cohort to be trained and monitored with coaching in the R3 model.

Treatment:

Behavioral: R3

Oregon County 2

Description:

Second cohort to be trained and monitored with coaching in the R3 model.

Treatment:

Behavioral: R3