An adapted summer treatment program for children with ADHD : investigating program effectiveness and moderators of treatment outcome

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder. Clinical practice guidelines established by the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend behavioral treatments as a first-line intervention for preschool and elementary-aged children with ADHD. The Summer Treatment Program (STP) is one such treatment, providing intensive intervention to children with ADHD in the form of an 8-week summer day treatment program. Despite promising outcomes, the STP model remains largely cost-prohibitive for mental health teams and for families. Camp Baker, developed by Judge Baker Children’s Center, is a 6-week adaptation of the STP model intended to be more feasible and accessible to children and families in need than the traditional 8-week program. Despite the preliminary evidence and support for the implementation of this adapted STP, further investigation is needed to understand the overall effectiveness of this treatment model in terms of clinically meaningful and interpretable outcomes and to identify subpopulations of children with particularly strong or poor response to this specific intervention. This is the first study to investigate both program effectiveness and moderators of treatment outcome for participants of a 6-week adaptation of the STP delivered in a community setting.