Bringing Evidence-Based Prevention to Communities - Prevention Science Is Testing the Best Approaches

With the major research breakthroughs over the past 30 years in understanding how to prevent risky behaviors and the most effective prevention interventions for doing so, the ability to deliver these evidence-based (EB) interventions and policies to communities remains a challenge to both the research and practice communities. This Prevention Talk will discuss some of the emerging science that is looking at effective implementation and dissemination approaches to EB prevention.  It will describe efforts involved in scaling up, i.e., having prevention professionals provide EB interventions to their target populations, and scaling out, i.e., to have these EB prevention interventions incorporated into existing health and social services in the community.  Dr. C. Hendricks Brown from Northwestern University will talk about these concepts and the developing conceptual frameworks that will help the field move forward to improve implementation in any of these service contexts.  He will also examine the continuing challenges faced by both researchers and practitioners as they work to bring the most effective prevention services into community practice.

Speaker Bio 

Dr. C. Hendricks Brown is Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Preventive Medicine and Medical Social Sciences at the Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine. He also holds adjunct appointments in the Departments of Biostatistics and Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as well as the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. Brown directs the NIDA funded Center for Prevention Implementation Methodology (Ce-PIM) for Drug Abuse and HIV and co-directs the CDC Chicago Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence. He directs Northwestern's Bridges Program, which develops and applies methods to foster partnerships among community, service delivery, and research, expressly addressing health and promoting equity. His work has focused on the prevention of drug abuse, conduct disorder, and depression, and particularly the prevention of suicide. He has a strong interest in developing new methodology for producing generalized knowledge about behavioral interventions, including developing innovative research designs for effectiveness, conducting mediational analyses, designing and carrying out implementation trials and modeling the effects of implementation strategies. He has published extensively on methods for conducting group-based randomized trials and methods to improve implementation research. Brown cochairs the National Academy of Sciences Forum on Promoting Children's Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Health and serves on numerous federal panels, advisory boards, and editorial boards.