Family-based Intensive Treatment (FIT): This service is delivered by a team consisting of a clinician, paraprofessional, and Family Partner (FIT Team) offering a combination of  intensive family therapy, robust care coordination ), and Family Partner engagement for youth with serious emotional disturbance who are under the age of 21.  

The main focus of the FIT Service is to ameliorate the youth's mental health issues and strengthen the family structures and supports with the goal of safely transitioning the youth into less-intensive, community-based treatment services within 4-6 months of the initiation of services. The FIT Service is distinguished from traditional outpatient therapy in that services are delivered in the home and community, rather than in a clinic setting. 

 

• Services include 24/7 urgent response capability for therapeutic stabilization of enrolled youth. 

• The frequency and duration of a given session matches need and is not time-limited scheduling is flexible.

• Services are expected to include the identification of natural supports and include coordination of care.

• The service facilitates a structured, consistent, strength-based therapeutic relationship between the FIT team and the youth and family for the purpose of treating the youth's behavioral health needs, including improving the family's ability to provide 2 Children’s Behavioral Health Initiative Family-based Intensive Treatment (FIT) effective support for the youth to promote the youth's healthy functioning within the family.

•  Interventions are designed to enhance and improve the family's capacity to improve the youth's functioning in the home and community and are focused on preventing the need for the youth's admission to an inpatient hospital, psychiatric residential treatment facility, or other treatment setting.

 

 The FIT team, inclusive of the caregiver(s) and youth, develops a treatment plan and, using established psychotherapeutic techniques and intensive family therapy, works with the entire family, or a subset of the family, to implement focused structural or strategic interventions and behavioral techniques to: improve communication, enhance problem-solving, build skills to strengthen the family dynamics, advance therapeutic goals, improve ineffective patterns of interaction, promote limit-setting, conduct risk management/safety planning, identify and utilize community resources, and develop and maintain natural supports for the youth and parent/caregiver(s) in order to promote sustainability of treatment gains. Phone contact and consultation are provided as part of the intervention, but the primary modality of treatment is in-person. The FIT service may be provided in any setting where the youth is naturally located, including, but not limited to, the home (including foster homes and therapeutic foster homes), schools, childcare centers, respite settings, and other community settings.