MST New Zealand was founded in 2001 as a response to an identified local need to develop clinically effective and cost-efficient treatments for at-risk youth. The mission of MST New Zealand is to provide high quality, individualised training and support to organisations seeking to deliver home-based intensive services using Multisystemic Therapy (MST).

We are a Network Partner of MST Services in the United States and are affiliated with the Family Services Research Centre (FSRC) at the Medical University of South Carolina, the primary academic organisation conducting clinical outcome trials on MST. Our organisation can offer you assistance with the full development of an MST programme by providing organisational development and support services, clinical training, and quality assurance support. Administratively, the relationship would be structured as a license agreement for MST between MST New Zealand and your organisation.

Our organisational development and support services include a pre-training meeting at your site with your organisation and other community stakeholders, as well as ongoing assistance with programme specification and design. This type of assistance might involve: review of RFP documents and/or responses, review of MST-related job descriptions, review of hiring advertisements, recommendations regarding clinical record keeping practices, specification of programme referral and discharge criteria, and evaluations of outcome measurement concepts. MST New Zealand would also support your organisation in overcoming barriers that may arise in achieving successful clinical outcomes. Such activities often include: promotion of the MST programme within the broader service community and development of programme-level interventions designed to increase referrals, reduce staff attrition, and/or restructure programme funding mechanisms.

The system that we provide has been carefully developed in partnership with MST Services and FSRC to ensure that the training, clinical supervision, consultation, and monitoring provided in the successful clinical trials of MST are replicated. This clinical training protocol has been refined through extensive experience with communities and providers in sites located in Australasia and internationally. Clinical training activities include: an initial on-site five-day orientation training, weekly telephone MST consultation aimed at monitoring treatment fidelity and adherence to the MST treatment model, and quarterly, issues-focused two-day training sessions.

Quality assurance support activities focus on monitoring and enhancing programme outcomes through ongoing evaluation of MST treatment fidelity and pragmatic therapeutic outcomes. Treatment fidelity is a crucial element of the programme as research has consistently indicated that adherence to the MST model is critical to achieving reduced rates of youth recidivism and incarceration. Accordingly, administration of the Therapist Adherence Measure (TAM) and Supervisor Adherence Measure (SAM) are conducted on behalf of each team by MST New Zealand. In addition, MST New Zealand monitors pragmatic therapeutic outcomes (i.e., school attendance, frequency and severity of offences, days in out-of-home placement) for each youth completing the MST programme both pre and post-treatment, and at six-month intervals up to two years following treatment. MST New Zealand is able to manage the treatment adherence and outcome data of each MST programme through its centralized data collection system, and your organisation has complete access to this data at any time. In addition, new measures of supervisor practices, organisational, and broader systems-level influences on client outcomes are under development and are available to interested MST site.