Federal Grant Award Summary

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded Massachusetts General Hospital $532,166 under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) on May 1, 2026, to develop and evaluate an innovative Family Care Planning (FCP) intervention addressing the growing public health crisis of prenatal substance exposure and opioid use disorder among pregnant and parenting women. The project, titled "Reimagining 'Plans of Safe Care:' Promoting Recovery, Family Well-Being, and Engendering Trust Through Family Care Planning," will operate through April 30, 2028, and aims to replace punitive, static documentation approaches mandated by the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) with longitudinal, family-centered teleconference meetings that bring mothers together with their clinical, community, and child welfare teams for respectful, facilitated treatment planning.

The project will be executed in two phases. During the R61 phase, the research team will refine and standardize FCP protocols using participatory co-design principles incorporating input from clinical adopters, mothers, community supports, and child welfare workers, while conducting pilot testing to assess feasibility, fidelity, and acceptability. The R33 phase will involve implementing a stepped-wedge cluster randomized controlled clinical trial to evaluate the intervention's effectiveness. This research directly addresses a critical gap in current state implementation efforts, as drug overdose accounts for approximately one-fifth of all pregnancy-associated deaths and drug-related foster care placements for infants have quadrupled over the past decade.