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Statewide learning collaboratives have the potential to improve access to evidence-based psychotherapies for children and adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) by improving knowledge and skills among mental health clinicians practicing in rural communities. We describe the effectiveness of using the CATIE learning collaborative to train Idaho-based mental health clinicians to treat DBD. Ninety-one clinicians completed a 6-month Coping Power Program (CPP) training course over a 2-year period. Improvement in clinician-reported self-efficacy and reported DBD patient-outcomes were observed. Ongoing benefit of learning collaboratives seems contingent on sustained engagement from local stakeholders. Recruitment and training clinicians beyond the grant-funded period were challenging. Public Health Significance StatementLimited access to evidence-based children's mental health services is disproportionately felt in rural parts of the U.S. Learning collaboratives are increasingly utilized to address this gap by training existing healthcare professionals to become more comfortable providing evidence-based mental health care. This study adds to existing literature by describing our experience with implementing a 2-year statewide learning collaborative in a large rural state and observed initial impact on patient care.

Mindfulness meditation has been practiced in the Eastern world for more than 25 centuries but only recently it has become popular in the West. Today, therapeutic interventions such as ‘Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction’ are used within health services throughout Europe as a means of improving patient wellbeing. Whilst these interventions have proved successful in reducing stress and depression a limitation is that they tend to apply the practices of mindfulness in an ‘out of context’ manner. Meditation Based Awareness Training (MBAT), on the other hand, includes a composite array of ‘spiritual-based’ trainings, which are traditionally assumed to enhance the cultivation of a more sustainable quality of wellbeing within the meditator.The purpose of this program is to design, implement, and evaluate MBAT as an approach to meditation and mindfulness that can be adapted to meet the needs of various populations. In the current phase, MBAT was developed in a general format for individuals from the general population who want to increase their levels of wellbeing. A controlled comparison trial has been run to evaluate this version of MBAT: Participants of the study undertook an 8-week MBAT program and comparisons were made with a control group on perceived psychological wellbeing (depression, anxiety, and anger management) and stress. In a second phase (not included in this presentation) MBAT will be adapted to populations with special needs, e.g., elderly people, trauma victims, and forensic inmates.Findings from the trial will be reported and implications for further development of MBAT will be discussed.