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Training clinical child psychologists necessitates explicit attention to the importance of developing cultural competencies for practice in diverse communities. This case study, comprising relevant social history, cultural models of child psychopathology and conceptual analysis of complex systems in bicultural Aotearoa New Zealand, offers salutary lessons for clinical practice internationally. In New Zealand, indigenous perspectives on children's mental health needs are holistic, encouraging trainee practitioners to recognise the systemic influences of extended family, school and community. Accommodating the expectations, values, and hegemony of both Māori and European populations requires service providers to acknowledge a broad interpretation of evidence‐based practice. In terms of true scientific progress, future best practice will require a rapprochement between the traditional knowledge of indigenous cultures and the empirically‐derived insights of psychology as an international discipline. The imperative to share power in decision‐making moves the debate beyond conventional multicultural sensitivities. Moral and political issues are inextricably entwined with clinical and professional activities.

Libraries supporting a forensic psychology undergraduate and/or graduate level college program need to collect materials from a range of disciplines – psychology, law, psychiatry and criminal justice. This guide identifies the major reference works, journals, databases and other resources that should be in a good forensic psychology collection.

Young people can often “fall through the gaps” between Child and Adolescent Mental Health services (CAMHS) and Adult Mental Health services (AMHS). This discursive viewpoint study aims to reflect a conversation among the authors on how CAMHS and AMHS psychiatry came together to develop and embed a UK community “Youth Mental Health Service”.

This reflective viewpoint study explores the perspectives of three of the lead CAMHS and AMHS psychiatrists from the implementation phase of a community youth mental health service. It explores, in a discursive way, these individuals’ views on some of the key facilitators and barriers in the development of the service that aimed to “bridge the gap” for young people.

These clinicians’ reflections recognise the importance of strong clinical leadership in enabling a youth/young adult model of mental health to be implemented. They also recognise how culture internal and external to a service has a key role to play in the success and sustainment of implementing an innovative model. This study describes a merging of CAMHS and AMHS psychiatry to meet the needs of young people in the most developmentally appropriate way.

This reflective study highlights the need for services and systems to think creatively about how they can allow flexibility for CAMHS and AMHS psychiatrists to learn and plan together, as well as gain experiences across the age ranges, to facilitate collaborative working that is developmentally appropriate and meets the needs of young people in a way that is accessible to them.

Evidence-based interventions (EBIs) for human services unfold within complicated social and organizational circumstances and are influenced by the attitudes and behaviors of diverse stakeholders situated within these environments. Coaching is commonly regarded as an effective strategy to support service providers in delivering EBIs and attaining high levels of fidelity over time. The purpose of this paper is to address a lacuna in research examining the factors influencing coaching, an important EBI support component.

The authors use the Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, and Sustainment framework to consider inner- and outer-context factors that affect coaching over time. This case study of coaching draws from a larger qualitative data set from three iterative investigations of implementation and sustainment of a home visitation program, SafeCare®. SafeCare is an EBI designed to reduce child neglect.

The authors elaborate on six major categories of findings derived from an iterative data coding and analysis process: perceptions of “good” and “bad” coaches by system sustainment status; coach as peer; in-house coaching capacity; intervention developer requirements vs other outer-context needs; outer-context support; and inner-context support.

Coaching is considered a key component for effective implementation of EBIs in public-sector systems, yet is under-studied. Understanding inner- and outer-context factors illuminates the ways they affect the capacity of coaches to support service delivery.

This paper demonstrates that coaching can accomplish more than provision of EBI fidelity support. Stakeholders characterized coaches as operating as boundary spanners who link inner and outer contexts to enable EBI implementation and sustainment.

This paper aims to describe coal-face challenges to making services in the UK work to ensure the mental and physical health, safety and wellbeing of children.

After briefly referring to some challenges to effective joined-up service provision, it describes examples from the first author's experience of problems, during 30+ years as an NHS clinical child psychologist, and some solutions. It then describes two challenges that underpin many of these problems: lack of understanding of, or training in, evaluating evidence for interventions and a more general lack of knowledge about effective behaviour change principles.

The paper concludes with recommendations about how to achieve effective joined-up services. Common themes emerging from the research are discussed, including choosing evidence-based programmes, providing adequate training to staff, and increasing people's understanding of behavioural principles.

Having effective joined-up services would mean better services for parents and their children, and would be more cost-effective for the NHS. The ideas presented in this paper could also be applied to other services within the NHS.

This article reports on three pragmatic randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to help children at risk of conduct disorder (CD): two involved the Incredible Years (IY) BASIC parent programme and the other concerned the IY teacher programme. All three interventions took place in regular service settings in North‐ and Mid‐Wales. In all three studies, staff from the provider agency delivered the programme and participated in RCT evaluations in which participants were randomly allocated to intervention or waitinglist control conditions. After a brief introduction to research into the prevention or treatment of CD, and the issues to be considered by services in selecting and delivering interventions, this article summarises the structure, content and evidence base of the IY programmes. The three Welsh studies are briefly described before exploring what factors contributed to service participation in the trials and the benefits and lessons learned in undertaking them.

Both the government and local service providers in the UK are becoming increasingly aware of the possibility of improving child outcomes through the delivery of parenting programmes. Government initiatives, such as Sure Start, Pathfinders and Flying Start are a positive step forward, yet programmes sometimes fail to work in service settings. This article describes the components necessary to deliver effective interventions, exploring the need to choose an evidence‐based parent programme, implement it with fidelity and evaluate the outcome. It describes the steps taken in North and Mid Wales to do this and reports briefly on the successful outcomes achieved by delivering the Incredible Years Basic Parenting Programme to the parents of high‐risk children in Sure Start areas.

This paper provides an overview of the national child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) mapping exercise, the workforce data reported in the mapping between 2003 and 2006, and how this data relates to current policy. The paper will first outline key issues within current CAMHS workforce policy and provide an introduction to the mapping process itself in order to establish the context in which the findings from the mapping exercises are being presented. The mapping is carried out by Durham University on behalf of the Department of Health. Core trend data is provided on the growth and development of the specialist CAMHS.

Young children who are referred to mental health agencies because of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct problems (CP) frequently have comorbid diagnoses or symptoms such as attention deficit disorder (ADD) with or without hyperactivity (ADHD), language/learning and developmental, or autism spectrum disorders. Research has shown that the Incredible Years Child Dinosaur programme offered to children with comorbid issues is successful at reducing behaviour problems and increasing social and emotional competence. This article examines ways in which this small group therapy programme is tailored to address the individual goals of each child so that the intervention is developmentally and therapeutically appropriate. It discusses group composition, as well as the importance of specific content and teaching methods for children with ADHD, academic and language delays and mild autism.

It has been brought to Emerald’s attention that the article “Adapting the Incredible Years child dinosaur social, emotional, and problem-solving intervention to address comorbid diagnoses” by Webster-Stratton, Carolyn and Reid, M. Jamila published in the Journal of Children’s Services, Vol. 3 No. 3, 2008, failed to disclose conflict of interests prior to publication. Author Carolyn Webster-Stratton disseminates the Incredible Years treatment and stands to gain from favourable reports. Because of this, she has voluntarily agreed to distance herself from certain critical research activities, including recruitment, consenting, primary data handling and data analyses. The authors apologise for not disclosing the information prior to publication. The University of Washington has approved these arrangements.

An electroencephalography (EEG) examination may cause psychological stress in children with autism that can interfere with the examination results. The objective information on the presence or absence of psycho-emotional stress in patients can help interpret electroencephalograms. This paper aimed to demonstrate the potential of noninvasive objective diagnostics of emotional stress in autistic children undergoing an EEG examination based on analysis of saliva.

This study involved 19 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (ICD-10 F84.0); the mean age was seven years. During EEG examination of the children, behavioral parameters were assessed. The activity of cytochrome P450 reductase (CYPOR) in saliva was measured before and after the EEG procedure using lucigenin-enhanced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate-stimulated chemiluminescence assay.

Significant differences in CYPOR activity were found between the children who were distressed during an EEG examination and the children without behavioral disturbances (Mann–Whitney test, p = 0.002). Thus, the EEG examination resulted in an increase in CYPOR activity in saliva cells, which may prove the stressful effect of this procedure on autistic children.

The chemiluminescent indices reflecting the activity of microsomal CYPOR in cells presenting in saliva correlate with the absence or presence of psychological stress in children; this phenomenon can be explained by an increased metabolism of the stress hormone, cortisol, by the cytochrome P450 microsomal system. Furthermore, the proposed method is completely safe, noninvasive, rapid (recording time is 20 min), inexpensive and promising for an objective assessment of psycho-emotional stress in autistic children undergoing medical examinations.