Maryland

The Center for Mental Health Services in Pediatric Primary Care: Pediatric Integrated Care Collaborative (PICC) will increase the quality of child trauma services by integrating behavioral and physical health services, targeting traumatic stress exposure and recovery, extending accessibility of services by integrating trauma-informed behavioral health services with primary care, and promoting a sustainable integration. The center will support three levels of collaborative activity: 1) a Breakthrough Series, which will generate and test innovations to bridge the gaps between existing practices for prevention/early intervention for toxic stress in young children and the application of these practices within primary care settings; 2) a Learning Collaborative, which will promote the dissemination and adoption of these innovations, and will develop a Pediatric Integrated Care Training and Resource Toolkit; and 3) an Integrated Care Collaborative Group (ICCG) of participants from SAMSHA-NCTSI–funded sites and Network Affiliates. Dissemination will also be facilitated through the center's six core sites, its links to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and its hosting of the National Network of Child Psychiatry Access Programs.
 

The challenges of military children and families are substantial and require greater understanding, education, and services than they are currently receiving. Some of the most severe experiences that military children face are related to wartime stress: specifically, deployment of military parents to combat, parental injury or illness, or parental death. Little if any data exist in many of these areas. The Uniformed Services University Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress (USU CSTS) Child and Family Program is responsible for developing knowledge related to military childhood experiences, developing effective public education materials, and expanding and studying effective intervention strategies, all using a strength-based approach.

Though USU CSTS does not receive funding from SAMHSA, it functions as a Treatment and Services Adaptation Center within the NCTSN. The center serves as a consultant to the Network, acts as a knowledge development and dissemination center, and creates trauma-focused products specific to military families.

The Kennedy Krieger Family Center (KKFC) is a program of Kennedy Krieger Institute, a Johns Hopkins University-affiliated specialty hospital internationally recognized for improving the lives of children and adolescents with developmental disabilities through patient care, training, research, and special education. Located in an urban community in Baltimore, KKFC has three programs: outpatient mental health, therapeutic foster care, and early Head Start. The KKFC Integrated Trauma Approaches program is being implemented in the outpatient program, a high-volume clinic that provides comprehensive, trauma informed, culturally sensitive mental health evaluation and treatment to children and families who are survivors of simple or complex trauma.

The Family-Informed Trauma Treatment (FITT) Center will lead local and national efforts to understand the impact of how trauma—especially complex trauma—impacts families, that families are the foundation through which children comprehend and cope with their traumatic experiences, and that family trauma interventions optimize healing. The FITT Center will enhance system capacity to address the needs of children and their families using a two-pronged approach of increasing provider capacity and the effectiveness of consumer advocacy. Objectives include providing new training and tools for child service systems’ workforces engaged with family systems exposed to chronic trauma related to poverty by: 1) widely disseminating via the FITT Toolkit; and 2) developing innovative training curricula, focusing on family-informed, evidence-based trauma interventions for mental health professionals and for master’s-level and doctoral students.  Collaborating with 19 Children’s Trauma Centers (CTCs) and other provider organizations that support large numbers of families living in poverty, the center will improve access to three effective family trauma treatments: Strengthening Families Coping Resources (SFCR), Trauma-Adapted Family Connections (TA-FC), and FamilyLive (FL); and to a family-based assessment and treatment planning tool: Family Assessment of Needs and Strengths-Trauma (FANS-Trauma).. Additionally, the FITT Center will develop messages and tools designed to help families learn how to be heard as they advocate in the public arena and within child service systems.

The Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), works to create an effective community-based mental health service infrastructure in the U.S. The center's foremost goals are to improve the availability and accessibility of high-quality care for people with or at-risk for mental illnesses and their families. CMHS also supports a portfolio of grant programs that develop and apply knowledge about best community-based practices to reach people at greatest risk: adults with serious mental illnesses and children with serious emotional disturbances. Issues of stigma and consumer empowerment are also on the center's agenda. Furthermore, the center collects and disseminates national mental health services data, designed to help inform future services policy and program decision-making.