The Intervention Handbook

The Intervention handbook summarizes the effect of treatments in child and adolescent mental health, based on international systematic reviews, meta-analyses and guidelines. This online resource is developed as an online tool to support clinicians in the choice of treatment, or a source of synthesized research for professionals, decicion-makers, patients, caregivers, educators or researchers. It was originally developed by RBUP on an assignment from the Norwegian Directorate of Health. The content is regularly updated (living systematic reviews) based on best practice methods for synthesizing research. Each chapter is dedicated to a diagnosis (e.g. anxiety or ADHD) or problem area (e.g. risk behaviour) and is based on the same structure:

1) a summary of the chapter

2) an extensive description of the condition or problem area, containing information on e.g. prevalence, severity and sub-categories.

3) an introduction to mandatory or optional use of screening instruments, and information on where to locate more information on these.

4) all relevant meta-analytic data on the effects of all identified interventions, together with GRADE assessment indicating trust in all findings and comparisons.

5) relevant resources such as patient organization on governmental websites.

Parts 2) and 3) are always written by a professional in the field, whereas part 4) is conducted and/or supervised by specialists in evidence synthesis. All chapters have been peer-reviewed. 

Copyright and Open Access

All articles in Tiltakshåndboka may be downloaded, printed, and distributed freely under the Creative Commons license. 

Editorial team

The Editorial team consists of researchers, experts in conducting systematic literature searches, and staff members with expertise in knowledge management and evidence-based practice: 

Methods 

Inclusion and exclusion criteria: All relevant systematic reviews concerning children (<18 years), investigating the effect of any intervention concerning child/adolescent (< 18 years) mental health or child welfare, published in the last five years. We include systematic reviews as defined by the DARE-criteria (Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects).

Literature search 

Inclusion of new systematic reviews is based on an extensive search conducted monthly for IN SUM: a database of systematic reviews on effects of child mental health and welfare interventions. IN SUM indexes reviews related to children’s and young people’s mental health from the following databases: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Campbell Library, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, and Web of Science. See the updated search strategy.  

We manually scan the following databases and organizational websites for additional relevant systematic reviews: 

• The Norwegian Institute of Public Health 

• Ungsinn: journal on effective mental health interventions for children and young people 

• The Swedish agency for health technology assessment and assessment of social services (SBU) 

• The Norwegian Directorate of Health 

• The Danish Health Authority 

• The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 

All identified references are screened independently by two reviewers. All references considered relevant by one or both reviewers are obtained in full text and screened independently. 

AMSTAR 

Two reviewers independently assess the systematic reviews with the AMSTAR checklist. All systematic reviews obtain an AMSTAR score (from 0 to 11, of which a higher value indicates a better score).  

GRADE

Two reviewers independently assess the certainty of the evidence with the GRADE tool (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation). For each outcome, we report the certainty of the evidence as very low, low, moderate or high. The lower the certainty of the evidence, the greater the likelihood that new research may change the conclusions.