Six months after helping launch a new clearinghouse for evidence-based practices in China, the USC School of Social Work hosted the project's director to further strengthen ties between the university and its Chinese partners.

You-ping Li, who heads the Chinese Clearinghouse for Evidence-Based Practice and Policy, spent a week at USC in April as a Provost's Distinguished Visitor, meeting with students, faculty, and administrators to describe her latest efforts to improve social and health services throughout mainland China.

Conceptualized as a central hub for scholars, researchers, and practitioners to find the most effective and proven tools to address social issues, the clearinghouse is still in its initial phase of development as a subsidiary of the Chinese Cochrane Centre. But Li, who said the online database is the first of its kind in China, has lofty goals for the project.

"We are striving for continuous improvement, striving for perfection," she said.

The portal is currently being populated with interventions in the field of child welfare, but organizers hope to expand to aging issues and other areas of social and health services soon. Li envisions the clearinghouse as an innovative, user-friendly resource that offers high-quality, tested interventions that are culturally suited to the Chinese.

Given its sheer size, China faces unique issues in terms of access to health and social care. Li described the nation as being divided into three zones: east, west and central China. A vast majority (94 percent) of people live in the east, a region that spans just 43 percent of the country's landmass.

Economic development, education and health care vary widely from one region to the next, and the west has greater diversity in terms of cultural and religious backgrounds. Additionally, young men often leave the rural areas in western China to find work in the east.

"At home, only the children, the women and the elderly population remain," Li said.

The Chinese government has rolled out ambitious plans to provide equal access to essential health care by 2020, she said, describing that task as a "huge challenge." It wasn't until recently that practitioners expanded the concept of health beyond physical ailments, and Li said there is a tremendous need for expanded interdisciplinary research.

"This is the weakest part of China's health system right now," she said.

The clearinghouse is located in Chengdu, Li's hometown in the southwestern Sichuan province. Staff members there have already translated a handful of tested interventions from the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare into Chinese.

Haluk Soydan, director of the school's Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services, heads a scientific committee that oversees the content of the clearinghouse. He said while the ultimate goal of the center is to create and test its own interventions, its initial development involves feedback from a panel of culturally competent experts who will examine the feasibility of Western methods in China.

"The best way of knowing whether an intervention works is to test that intervention in the site of intended use," Soydan said. "But testing this in a new context is an expensive and time-intensive process."

For now, the committee will recommend changes to social intervention models to fit Chinese culture and societal norms. Eventually, the clearinghouse will support its own outcome studies to develop its own effective interventions, and feed that data back into the system.

"It's a circle," Li said. "This is evidence-based medicine."

Soydan, who helped found the prestigious Campbell Collaboration, an international clearinghouse for evidence on education, crime and justice, and social welfare, conceived the Chinese database after aiding in the development of a handful of other clearinghouses. He knew Li through her previous work with the Campbell Collaboration, and the two quickly sketched out the concept in a few days.

"She is a person of action," Soydan said of Li. "In China, she plays a major role."

After establishing the scientific committee, developing the hardware and online platform for the database, and beginning to assess the feasibility of Western psychosocial interventions in China, the project team launched the clearinghouse in September 2010 using seed money from USC.

Future plans include developing methods of providing information on evidence-based practices to social service agencies. Li and her staff are also establishing virtual reference centers at leading medical universities throughout China to serve as a resource for students and staff in terms of proper research methodology.

During her visit to USC, Li visited several schools with strong connections to China and is interested in strengthening the strategic partnership between USC and Sichuan University, where she is the director of West China Hospital's Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Medicine.

Ultimately, the two institutions hope to expand beyond the Chinese clearinghouse project to pursue joint research activities in social work practice and human services, organize international conferences and symposia, and develop a truly international exchange of students, faculty and knowledge.