Focusing on Relationships: An Effort That Pays

Offers a clear path to relationship-based case formulation, treatment planning, documentation, and billing that readily conforms with the requirements of standard systems of care. This book is an indispensable tool for all mental health professionals who work with infants and toddlers and their families.

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The field of infant and early childhood mental health is in a quandary. Best practice demands that infants and young children be treated in the context of their relationships with caregivers. But health insurance systems, including Medicaid, require that an individual, not a relationship, be identified as a subscriber and that treatment be documented and billed accordingly. This discrepancy produces conceptual and ethical dilemmas for clinicians. How do they document relationship-based intervention? How do they bring billing procedures into alignment with best practice? How do they get paid for the work they do?

This book offers a solution: The Parent-Child Relationship Competencies (PCRCs) are a set of capacities that emerge spontaneously under ordinary circumstances, but which may be strained, impaired, or absent when something is wrong. PCRC-focused clinical assessment offers a clear path to relationship-based case formulation, treatment planning, documentation, and billing that readily conforms with the requirements of standard systems of care.

With a foreword by former Director of the Infant-Parent Program, Jeree H. Pawl, this book will be an indispensable tool for all mental health professionals who work with infants and toddlers and their families.