Promising Practices

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens

Goal: The goal of CAST training is to deliver life-skills training to high-risk high school students in order to increase mood management skills, improve school performance, and decrease drug involvement.

Impact: CAST participants in several NIH-funded studies saw significant and sustained reduction of suicide risk behaviors, reduction of drug use, reduction in depression, increase in personal control, increase in problem-solving, and increase in family support.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders, Children, Families

Goal: The goal of this program is to reduce aggressive behavior and delinquency in children by applying the contextual sociocognitive model.

Filed under Effective Practice, Education / Student Performance K-12, Children

Goal: Core Knowledge is based on the idea that for the sake of academic excellence, greater fairness, and higher literacy, elementary and middle schools need a solid, specific, shared core curriculum in order to help children establish strong foundations of knowledge, grade by grade.

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Health Care Access & Quality

Goal: The goals of this promising practice were to identify the transportation-disadvantaged population that lacks nonemergency medical care because of low access to transportation; determine the medical conditions that this population experiences and describe other characteristics of these individuals, including geography; estimate the cost of providing the transportation necessary for this population to obtain medical transportation according to various transportation service needs and trip modes; estimate the healthcare costs and benefits that would result if these individuals obtained transportation to non-emergency medical care for key healthcare conditions prevalent for this population; and compare the relative costs (from transportation and routine healthcare) and benefits (such as improved quality of life and better managed care, leading to less emergency care) to determine the cost-effectiveness of providing transportation for selected conditions.

Impact: These results show that adding relatively small transportation costs do not make a disease-specific, otherwise cost-effective environment non-cost-effective. Providing increased access to non-emergency medical care does improve quality of life and saves money per patient.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Cancer, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban

Goal: The goal of this program is to decrease barriers and increase rates for colorectal cancer screening among low-income, non-English speaking patients.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Wellness & Lifestyle, Men, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The overall goal of d-up! is to increase the number of black MSM who use a condom when they have sex.

Filed under Effective Practice, Environmental Health / Toxins & Contaminants

Goal: The goal of DfE is to facilitate the identification, adoption and innovation of clean products, processes, technologies, and management systems.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Cancer, Adults

Goal: The goal of this program was to increase colorectal cancer screening using direct mailings of fecal occult blood test (FOBT) kits for noninvasive colon cancer screening.

Impact: Direct mailing of FOBT kits resulted in an increase in self-reported colon cancer screening adherence.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens, Men, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The primary aim of Draw the Line/Respect the Line is to reduce the number of students who initiate or have sexual intercourse and to increase condom use among those students who do have sexual intercourse.

Filed under Good Idea, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Urban

Goal: It is the mission of the Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration (APRA) to promote and enforce the highest quality regulatory standards for delivering services related to alcohol, tobacco and other drugs (ATOD) addictions; to prevent ATOD addictions; and to identify, treat and rehabilitate persons who are addicted giving priority to residents of the District of Columbia.