The National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare, a resource center jointly funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Children’s Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, has created a Child Welfare Training Toolkit. The toolkit provides guidance to child welfare professionals about substance use and co-occurring disorders within families involved in the child welfare system. The toolkit comprises 10 modules – 7 core and 3 specialized areas – that build foundational knowledge to support an understanding of substance use, identify when substance use is a factor in child welfare cases, offer strategies for parental engagement, acknowledge the effects of substance use on children and caregivers, and present steps on how to build collaborations for a system of care.

The National Resource Center for Healthy Marriage and Families will host a webinar on October 10, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET to discuss strategies for supporting parents of children with special needs. Presenters will share tips on what parents can do to create a hopeful future for themselves as a couple and for their child. Topics to be covered include strategies parents can use after finding out that their newborn has a developmental disability, and resources for helping later in their child’s transition to adulthood. This webinar is intended for service providers who work with parents as well as parents and guardians themselves. Speakers from the UCLA School of Nursing, University of Utah, and Utah Parent Center will present.

This Urban Institute report reviews how patients can access opioid use disorder treatment at facilities in New Jersey that offer pharmacotherapy as a treatment option. The report summarizes phone survey findings about service availability, wait times, Medicaid coverage for treatment, and county-specific data to assess the demand for treatment options.

The National Association of Counties will host the first of a two-part webinar on October 10, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET to review the collection, management, and sharing of data among health and human services and justice systems to address incarcerated persons with mental illness. Subject matter experts from county health and human services and justice systems at the local level will discuss the processes they use to collect, share, integrate, and analyze pertinent data. The second part of this webinar series will be hosted in December 2019.