The Mental Health Services Program for Youth Replication was a national program set up by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to follow-up on the results of the Mental Health Services Program for Youth that ran from 1988 to 1998.

The original program was a $20 million effort designed to demonstrate that through a collaborative effort between states and local communities, a more comprehensive, effective service system for seriously mentally ill youth could be developed.

The purpose of the Mental Health Services Program for Youth Replication was to assist states with relatively small grants to enable them to use and apply an array of tools and techniques developed in the eight sites in the original program.

Key Results

• Eight of 12 states developed capitated market-oriented systems of care. The four states that had not reached this point by the end of the program were moving in this direction when the program ended.
• Early data from the states indicates the following results:
  • In Illinois, more than 1,000 children were enrolled in wraparound plans, which led to a net reduction of 1,000 children in residential treatment centers.
  • The Dawn Project in Indiana documented a reduction by 50 percent in the cost of residential care.
  • In Mississippi, in the first year of implementation, the project reported a 95 percent reduction in institutional out-of-community placements.
  • In San Francisco, there was a decrease in hospital use of more than one third, residential placements were at one-half of the projected rate, and re-arrests were reduced by 28 percent.
  • In Massachusetts, the total number of hospital days dropped from 56 in the previous 12 months, to 17 in the first 12 months of the program.
  • In Michigan, none of the children with a substantiated abuse/neglect complaint had a similar complaint one year after receipt of wraparound services.

Program Management
Both programs were managed through a national program office at the Washington Business Group on Health, Washington, D.C., a nonprofit national health policy and research organization whose membership includes many of the nation's major employers.

Funding
In July 1993, the RWJF Board of Trustees authorized up to $750,000 for sites in the replication program. It planned to make start-up grants to 10 states to help those states improve the organization and financing of their service delivery systems for seriously mentally ill children.

In April 1996, RWJF authorized $150,000 for grants to two additional sites, bringing to 12 the number of states that could receive support and technical assistance.

The 12 states that participated in the Mental Health Services Program for Youth Replication were: California (using funding that remained from the original program), Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington.