Effectiveness of a children’s home and community-based services waiver program

Limited alternatives exist to residential treatment or hospitalization for children with the most serious emotional disturbances. Community-based interventions are intended to offer less restrictive and expensive options than traditional treatment. One such program is New York State’s Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) Waiver Program.

From 1996 to 2002, 169 children were enrolled in the Manhattan HCBS. All spent at least one month on the wait list prior to admission to the waiver program. We used our wait list as a control group (WLC), allowing for comparison of the HCBS intervention.

Sample consisted of 169 children between the ages of five and eighteen. The ethnic composition was 46.8% Hispanic (N = 79), 47.9% African-American (N = 81), and 5.3% Caucasian (N = 9). Average stay was 12 months in the HCBS program and 3.5 months for the WLC. Only 30% of children in the WLC were maintained in the community, while 81% of children in the HCBS were similarly maintained (P < 0.001). Also, the rate of hospitalization for the HCBS group was significantly lower (3 versus 41%; P < 0.001). There was also a trend for the WLC group to have had substantially higher rates of removal by the Administration for Children’s Services (New York City’s protective service agency) (8.3 versus 1.8%) and to more frequently require residential treatment (13.0 versus 8.9%).

It would seem that the HCBS program appears to be a clinically and cost-effective method of maintaining children in their community.