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Accessing Children's Mental Health Services In A Rural Northern California County, Deborah Wingate

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

When children are detained and enter the foster care system, social workers screen them to determine if mental health services are needed. Formal referrals to mental health providers are made, however there is a significant wait time between referral and service delivery.

The focus of this study was to explore these barriers to mental health services in an effort to identify approaches that might improve service access. Qualitative face-to-face interviews were conducted with key stakeholders using an Ecological Systems Theory to fashion a hermeneutic dialect and a joint construct toward a shared action plan. Data was collected from the interviews …