Low Intensity Family Support for Syrian Refugees in an LMIC
Project Site Name: Medeniyet University, Turkish Red Crescent
Project Site Location: Istanbul, Turkey
UIC CGH Faculty Contact: Stevan Weine, MD
Project/Activity Summary:
The prolonged Syrian refugee crisis has displaced 3.1 million refugees to Turkey, with the vast majority not living in camps and with no access to mental health resources. This project develops and pilot tests a novel model for helping urban refugee families in LMICs with little to no access to evidence-based mental health services, by delivering a transdiagnostic family intervention for common mental disorders in health sector and non-health sector settings.
The project forms a Family Support Design Team (FSDT) to adopt the PM+ and CAFES manuals into a family support (FS) intervention for use with Syrian refugee families by lay providers in community sites and nurses in clinical sites using a four-session multiple family group format. The project pilots FS with families in community and clinical sites, and then through observations and qualitative interviews, assesses FS’s feasibility, fidelity, the impact of context and local capacity, the experiences of intervention delivery, and practitioner and organizational perspectives on scale up. The project conducts pre, immediate post, and 3-month post assessments of the Syrian refugee families who received FS through all the sites, to demonstrate the kind of pre-post changes that have been reported for comparable interventions and to determine key parameters of interest with sufficient accuracy and precision. Project collaborators include the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Medeniyet University, the Centre for Global Health at the University of Prishtina and 3 community and 3 clinical organizations in Istanbul.
Turkish Red Crescent Psychosocial Program Evaluation
Project Site Name: Turkish Red Crescent
Project Site Location: Istanbul, Turkey
UIC CGH Faculty Contact: Stevan Weine, MD
Project/Activity Summary:
This project is conducting a process evaluation that utilizes ethnographic, survey, and community collaborative methods to determine whether program activities have been implemented as intended. The results of the process evaluation are to improve the quality of services and future activities of the psychosocial programming provided by the Turkish Red Crescent (TRC) for Syrian refugees in community centers in Turkey.
The specific purpose of the process evaluation is to characterize the present and anticipated future local context and identify areas of need as defined by the refugee families themselves, the psychologists, program managers, and community advocates. To characterize the fit or lack of fit between existing psychosocial programs and the perceived needs of refugee families in the present and anticipated future local context and to refine the existing logic model so as to identify adjustments to programming, which could involve evidence-based interventions structured in several tiers. Additionally, the process evaluation will provide a set of culturally competent measures for adults and children and a plan for their use in monitoring of individual cases and program outcomes.