Early Intervention Skills for Preschool Children With Emotional and Stress Related Disorders
Condition: Mental Disorder, Child
MeSH terms: Mental Disorders; Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      This study is about early intervention for preschool children with emotional and stress
      related disorders. To develop a set of program that could be used in district hospitals for
      early intervention of preschool children with emotional and stress related disorder or
      problems.
    

Detailed description: 
      The objective of this study will be including two aspects. The first one is to develop a set
      of comprehensive program that including psychoeducation, screening, basic assessment,
      diagnosis and basic treatment on the emotional and stress related disorders/problems in
      preschool children. This program is easy implemented for the psychiatrists and pediatricians
      who work in district primary hospitals. They are not only see patients in hospital but also
      responsible for the healthcare education in community and kindergarten. In this project they
      will be trained to master the knowledge and skills on early intervention on the emotional and
      stress related disorders/problem for preschool children in kindergarten and the basic
      treatment skills in clinic. The second aspect is the district primary psychiatrists and
      pediatricians provide psychoeducation, screening and training in kindergarten. The teachers
      will be trained the program on teaching children the skills on emotional self-regulation and
      basic stress coping. It's expected that this program will help the primary psychiatrists and
      pediatricians' clinical skills and help them to improve the awareness and skills of
      children's emotional and stress related problems/disorder in teachers and parents, improve
      children's emotional and stress related problems/disorders.

      The comprehensive program will include the attained achievements from our past research (the
      screening questionnaires, interview methods, booklets and protocol for teachers and parents,
      book and courses for training children on emotional self-regulation and stress coping skills,
      a simplified CBT manual for children that the trained psychiatrist could use. Xinhua Hospital
      will be leading this project and 5 primary hospitals in 4 districts will be involved in.
      These five collaborators hospitals were selected from Shanghai district-level Maternal and
      Child Health hospitals and district-level Mental Health Center as a pilot.

      The selected pediatricians will be major at development and behavioral area, and
      psychiatrists will be preferring children. They will be trained the common emotional and
      stress related disorders, screening methods, basic diagnosis skill and basic intervention
      techniques. After training, they could provide the preventive intervention in kindergarten
      and the basic service in clinic. Five hundred children from four years old to six years old
      will be in the early intervention group, and another five hundreds children at the same age
      will be in the control group for waiting the intervention. The comparisons of the two groups
      will be on the knowledge improvement in teacher and parents, the decrease of the prevalence
      of and the level of emotional and stress related disorders/problems.
    

Intervention name(s): Children's emotional and stress coping program
Intervention type(s): Behavioral
Intervention description(s): Giving the children lessons about the emotional self-regulation skills and stress coping skills, with the psychoeducation books and lectures for the teachers and parents.
Allocation: Non-Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Health Services Research
Keywords: preschool children; emotional disorders/problems; stress related disorders/problems; early intervention