ABSTRACT
This discussion is concerned with early development of an intervention to aid long-term, severely impaired clients. The study was conducted through the Center for Child and Family Policy Studies at UCLA, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. Because of the varied definitions of case management and the multiple extant forms of practice, the Department requested the Center to aid in constructing a clear-cut, coherent model of case management functions. An early step involved establishing an information base to guide the work. Initial information gathering included comprehensive retrieval and synthesis of existing research on case management (Chapter 7 and Rothman 1992). Concurrently, 48 case managers were interviewed intensively in a field survey concerning the functions they performed, the sequencing of these functions, and interrelationships among the functions (Rothman 1987). Based on these findings, the research staff, working with agency representatives, designed an initial model of case management functions (Rothman 1991). See Figure 1 for the working formulation of the original model.
