Future directions in residential treatment.

Residential treatment has assumed a role in the service system of being the placement of last resort. This has been driven by various policy initiatives and trends to which the field has tended to respond with defensiveness. Experiences over the past few decades have demonstrated that the issue for residential programs is not simply the survival of an important service for seriously troubled children and their families, but rather the development of a new paradigm for residential treatment's role in community service systems. This paradigm involves residential treatment programs and the a more proactive stance with local, statewide, and national partners, helping to create integrated systems of care, implement outcome measurement, and create family- and community-centered programming.