Researchers and Mental Health Professionals Meet to Discuss Youth and Adolescents in the San Francisco Bay Area

Read about Dr. Ritchie Rubio here.


Trauma Transformed and SAMHSA are co-hosting the Regional CANS Reflection and Focus Group in Oakland today. Facilitators will lead a discussion to share regional learning around best practices and common challenges in implementing CANS in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths Assessment (or CANS) is an outcome measure used to assess for overall psychological, social, emotional, and behavioral functioning of children and youth.

Dr. Ritchie Rubio, full time faculty member for the Counseling Psychology Program at the Wright Institute, will be presenting his work on data reflection in the Child, Youth, and Families system of care of San Francisco.

Dr. Rubio says of his presentation: "It's related to my work as consulting evaluator/research psychologist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. A lot of our students use the CANS tool at their practicum sites. I introduce this measure in courses I teach like Clinical Assessment Measures (CAM), Research-Based Practice (RBP), and Crisis, Disaster, and Trauma Counseling (CDTC).

"My role in this meeting is to present my work on data reflection in the Child, Youth, and Families system of care of San Francisco. I started a data reflection initiative in San Francisco to motivate clinicians to reflect on their client's data as a means to promote their effectiveness. Many clinicians are averse to looking at data due to 'math trauma.' So I found a means to get clinicians excited about data by integrating clinical interventions (such as sand tray therapy and narrative therapy) with statistical data. For example, in looking at a bar graph of outcomes, instead of asking 'What do these numbers mean?,' I have encouraged clinicians to ask questions like, 'Where is the energy in this chart?' or 'What story is this chart telling me?'"

Click here to learn more about the Wright Institute’s Doctor of Clinical Psychology (Psy.D.) program.
Click here to learn more about the Wright Institute’s Master of Counseling Psychology program.