Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress -Children's Hospital of Philadelphia & Nemours / A.I Dupont Hospital (PA) [1]
The Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress (CPTS) addresses health-related traumas in the lives of children and families. Tens of millions of children in the US each year face injury, illness, pain, and frightening treatment experiences. Medical traumatic stress includes child and family responses to these medical events. The Center’s mission is to reduce medical traumatic stress by promoting trauma-informed health care and ensuring that health care providers are knowledgeable and skilled in trauma-informed care with diverse youth and their families. The Center develops and disseminates practical evidence-based tools that can be integrated into pediatric medical care. CPTS is unique in the Network in its core focus on secondary and tertiary health care settings, i.e., hospitals, emergency departments, and subspecialty medical care. CPTS’ work in the NCTSN focuses on three goals / key constituencies: 1) Helping health care providers and health care systems improve outcomes for children and families at risk for medical traumatic stress by promoting evidence-based trauma-informed health care services. 2) Helping mental health and psychosocial providers become proficient in evidence-based interventions for ill and injured children and their families. and 3) Ensuring that children and families across the US have access to evidence-based resources and interventions that address the impact of medical traumatic stress for children’s health and wellbeing. The Center promotes awareness of medical traumatic stress and trauma-informed pediatric health care via www.HealthCareToolbox.org [2].