In-Home Clinical Services

The purpose of ASCI’s in-home model is to implement family-oriented mental wellness services for kinship children and families in their homes, to strengthen and preserve healthy kinship families for children.  ASCI is committed to servicing the entire triad—child/youth, caregiver and birth parents—to effectively preserve and strengthen the kinship family unit.  

Our goals and objectives: 

  • To preserve the kinship family placement through safety, stability and well-being. 
  • To promote permanency through planning with members of the kinship triad. 
  • To improve the overall mental and emotional wellness of members of the kinship triad. 
  • To reduce the incidents of parent-child, sibling and extended family conflict. 
  • To eliminate emergency out-of-home placements due to runaways and psychiatric hospitalizations. 
  • To decrease adjudications of delinquency among dependent youth through crisis prevention services. 
  • To moderate the risks of truancy, drug use, gang activity and teen pregnancy through crisis intervention. 

Services provided to address federal outcomes of safety, permanency and child well-being: 

  • Individual and family assessments; mental health treatment recommendations; educational advocacy; kinship family empowerment; permanency planning; support-group facilitation; clinical supervision of parent-child visits; information and referral services.
  • We teach:   
    • Anger management skills, life skills, social skills, positive parenting skills and effective communication skills for kinship families. 
  • Referral criteria:
    • Kinship families who are most appropriate to receive in-home services may have characteristics that include but are not limited to: 
    • Referred for assistance with prevention resources. 
    • Mild to moderate emotional, psychiatric, behavioral and/or physical and cognitive issues. 
    • Children at risk for truancy, drug use, teen pregnancy and delinquency. 
    • Adult-child, sibling and extended family conflict. 
    • In need of crisis intervention services to prevent a disruption in their kinship placements. 
    • Require education, mediation, support groups, counseling and/or preparation for permanency. 
    • Teens and young parents aging out of the child welfare system in need of support systems, parenting skills and self-sufficiency services.  
    • Unresolved visitation plans that require clinical supervision, assessment and mediation.  
  • Exclusionary criteria:   
    • Kinship families with severe emotional, psychiatric, behavioral and cognitive issues.  
    • Service delivery: Crisis safety plans; critical case conferences; kinship preservation assessment; FACES III and treatment assessments completed by masters-level clinical specialist determine the frequency and duration of in-home services.  
    • In addition to the clinical tools utilized, ASCI has a special-needs checklist, an assessment tool that helps identify critical-services needs of an individual kinship care child and evaluates PAT level assignment.  

If further psychological assessment is needed during the intake, assessment or discharge/termination phases of service delivery, the kinship child or family is referred immediately to an appropriate, qualified mental health provider.  

Special in-home services provided: 

  • Post-adoption services for kinship children and families adopted under the SWAN unit 
  • Educational advocacy 
  • Counseling by Masters-level clinicians 
  • Counseling services 
    • Psychosocial assessment 
    • Treatment planning 
    • Individual and family counseling 
    • Treatment plan reviewing 
    • Crisis services 
  • Critical Case Conferences (CCC), which are comprehensive, all-provider-inclusive staffing for children in ASCI’s kinship care, facilitated and structured clinically from a crisis perspective. 
  • Case consultations, recommendations and referral services 
  • Specialized trainings for staff and families 
  • Mental health advocacy and awareness through Mental Health Awareness Campaigns