OAHU INTENSIVE SUPPORT SERVICES

OAHU INTENSIVE SUPPORT SERVICES

Oahu Intensive Support Services offer family-centered, community-based services providing learning opportunities for youth and promoting their optimal behavioral health.

How can the Oahu Intensive Support Services program help you?
The program provides individualized services to families and youth with serious behavioral, social, and emotional challenges. These issues negatively affect youths' ability to successfully live at home or remain in school and they interfere with positive, productive family and peer relationships.

Services are planned and delivered in partnership with key family members and system personnel, including for example: parents or legal guardians; care coordinators and other behavioral health professionals; justice/law enforcement personnel; school staff; other relatives or adults connected with the youth; other service providers.

Treatment strategies are grounded in established clinical theory and empirically-supported therapeutic principles. Interventions are evidence-based and focus on key factors in each of the following areas:

  • Family networks and relationships
  • School or job performance
  • Peer connections and relationships
  • Neighborhood and community networks and supports

What specific therapeutic model does the Oahu Intensive Support Services program use?

Multisystemic Therapy (MST)

What is MST?
Multisystemic Therapy (MST) is an evidence-based treatment program for youth with serious and complex problems who live at home. Therapists work with youth and their parents on specific goals that will enable the youth to continue living at home, going to school or to work and avoiding arrest or re-arrest.

Therapists are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, wherever and whenever necessary.
Therapists work with no more than four to six families at a time. Treatment is intensive, including daily or weekly multiple contacts with family members and others.

How do families obtain MST services?
Youth and their families are screened by and referred to Parents And Children Together through Family Guidance Centers located throughout the State.

Where do MST services take place?
Therapists work wherever necessary in the community, in family homes or in Parents And Children Together offices.

How long do MST services last?
Generally up to three to five months.

Where are MST services located?
Parents And Children Together MST therapists are on the islands of Oahu, Kauai, Maui and Molokai.

Who is MST for?
MST has been effective with chronic, behavioral, complex emotional, social and academic needs.

Is there a fee?
Services are provided free of charge.

To request services, contact the Student Services Coordinator (SSC) or School-Based Behavioral Health Specialist (SBBH) at your child's school. You can also contact your local Family Guidance Center.


Oahu Family Guidance Centers
Honolulu: 808-733-9393
Central Oahu: 808-453-5900
Windward: 808-233-3770
Leeward: 808-692-7700


Mailing Address
1300 Halona Street
Honolulu, Hawaii 96819
Email: [email protected]


Oahu Intensive Support Services is primarily funded by Hawaii Department of Health.