UC Davis CAARE Center's PCIT & PC-CARE Training Center has provided quality training, consultation and technical assistance to agencies and individuals in understanding how trauma impacts children and their families since 1999 and now provides training and trainer certification in a brief parenting intervention, Parent-Child Care (PC-CARE), using these same empirically supported strategies. There is a strong demand for training in trauma-informed, evidence-based parenting treatments suitable for young children and a deficit of mental health providers. At the same time, mental health service needs among children, particularly in vulnerable low-income and immigrant populations, is increasing. Thus, many agencies look to paraprofessionals, home visitors, and case managers to provide services to children and families in need. Whereas training and implementation of EBTs has become more effective and engaging for mental health professionals, training in trauma-informed care and practices for paraprofessionals has lagged. This Category II project is designed to overcome these barriers to training paraprofessionals and non-mental health professionals that work with traumatized children with training in PC-CARE and PC-CARE Toolbox. PC-CARE is a brief, effective parenting intervention that demonstrates high retention rates (90%) and can be delivered by non-licensable mental health providers. It provides an early and rapid screening, assessment, and intervention for traumatized children in diverse settings. PC-CARE Toolbox, for workers in child-serving but non-mental health settings, uses a web-based interactive platform to teach about child development, child trauma, and PC-CARE skills, as well as consultation and documentation to give experiential training and support.
Network Members
This listing of NCTSN members includes current grantees as well as NCTSN Affiliates, former grantees who have maintained their ties to the Network.
University of California, Davis/ Dept. of Pediatrics/ CAARE Center
University of California, Los Angeles (Szilagyi)
The Pediatric Approach to Trauma, Treatment and Resilience (PATTeR) is a multi-site project. The three project sites include the American Academy of Pediatrics, the University of Massachusetts Medical School and UCLA's Section on Developmental Studies. The focus of PATTeR is to develop curricula focused on trauma and resilience specifically for pediatricians who are the first child professionals family encounter and the most frequent gate-keepers to subspecialty care, including trauma-informed mental health care, and to supportive community-based services. During year one, we will focus on developing two levels of curricula: Trauma Aware and Trauma Informed. Through the AAP, which is the professional home of over 60,000 pediatricians across the United States, we will recruit pediatricians serving children and families in a variety of settings but focus on those serving certain high risk groups: those living in poverty, involved with child welfare or social services, those living in resource-poor areas and military families. Case-based learning designed to lead to practice change will occur in a group on-line format (using ECHO Technology) with an expert panel. Trauma Aware training will occur over 6 sessions. Pediatricians seeking to become trauma training resources in their own communities or AAP chapters will complete the more detailed Trauma-Informed training over 12 sessions. We will also recruit residency program leaders through the Academic Pediatrics Association to engage in both curricula since they are the educators who will transform pediatric residency education. We will also infuse curricula into multiple AAP education venues and anticipate reaching thousands of pediatricians during the grant cycle.
University of California, San Francisco, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Areas of expertise is infant/early childhood trauma, including child maltreatment, domestic violence, loss of a loved one; community violence; traumas related to undocumented migration and refugee status; war and terrorism. We focus on the impact of early childhood trauma on child-parent relationship and family functioning as a risk factor that derails healthy developmental trajectories and increases the likelihood of mental health problems. Activities involve developing, testing, implementing, and disseminating evidence-based and promising relationship-based trauma treatments and interventions, including Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), Perinatal Child-Parent Psychotherapy (P-CPP), Attachment Vitamins, and Semillas the Apego. The site has specific expertise in Latinx populations. It provides services and develops materials and products in English and Spanish.
University of Chicago Medicine REACT Program
The University of Chicago Medicine REACT Program: Recovery and Empowerment After Community Trauma represents a response to Chicago's greatest ongoing public health challenge: violence. Based in an urban children's hospital, UCM REACT provides African American patients affected by community violence with brief trauma-focused intervention, as well as access to trauma-informed psychiatric and psychological services and ongoing trauma-focused therapy. UCM REACT builds on Healing Hurt People - Chicago (HHP-C), a partnership between UCM Comer Children's Hospital and the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County. HHP-C offers hospital-based violence intervention services to young patients who have been shot or suffered other violent injuries. The REACT Program, linked to the Comer Children's emergency department and PICU, provides trauma screening, support, psychoeducation, and intervention to Comer patients of all ages who have been affected by community violence, whether or not they have sustained violent injuries. The REACT Clinic, co-directed by a trauma psychologist and a child psychiatrist, provides trauma-informed psychological and psychiatric needs assessments patients identified by REACT and HHP-C. REACT and HHP-C clinicians receive training in and utilize the Child & Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI). Finally, REACT and HHP-C clients have access to ongoing therapy services through provider partnerships with clinicians/programs with expertise in serving urban African American families, complex trauma, Child-Parent Psychotherapy, and ARC (Attachment, Regulation, & Competency).
University of Colorado Denver: Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of child Abuse and Neglect
The Trauma Informed Practice program of the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect offers training, consultation, and technical assistance with implementation and evaluation to professionals from all fields that deal with children, youth, and families exposed to trauma. Recent collaborations with child welfare, school, and behavioral health partners have included building a trauma-informed child welfare workforce in Denver county, implementing a universal screening and referral system for all children and youth with open child welfare cases, leading learning collaboratives in two trauma-focused EBPs to increase the local mental health service array, establishing statewide fidelity measures and credentialing criteria for High-Fidelity Wraparound, managing a statewide learning management system for behavioral health professionals, partnering with school staff in the NCTSN Breakthrough Series Collaborative for supporting trauma-informed schools, and creating two toolkits to be used statewide for trauma-responsive practice (one for school staff and one for behavioral health).
University of Connecticut Health Center
The Center for Treatment of Developmental Trauma Disorders (CTDTD) brings together developers of leading evidence-based trauma treatments (EBTT) for children victimized by developmental trauma and professional and lived experience experts on culturally responsive trauma-informed services, to enhance clinical and peer providers therapeutic competence nationally and to enhance public understanding of and reduce stigma associated with DTD.Over the 5-year funding period, CTDTD will expand, and develop training curricula based on, its groundbreaking 35-webinar series Identifying Critical Moments and Healing Complex Trauma providing experiential training that will enhance the ability of more than 25,000 peer and professional counselors to treat more than 125,000 children safely, culturally responsively, and effectively for DTD-as well as creating a permanent archive of the Critical Moments webinars showing films with professional or peer therapists handling moment-to-moment therapy crises with dramatized child/family clients of diverse ethnoracial/cultural backgrounds who are recovering from developmental and historical trauma. CTDTD will produce and disseminate nationally: (a) 25 webinars with new films of dramatized crisis therapy sessions (and post-session commentary), (b) a companion set of 25 dramatized multi-disciplinary family service planning session films including parents/caregivers, teachers, child welfare workers, probation officers, healthcare providers, and mentors; (c) a companion set of 50 Digital diary films highlighting key developmental dilemmas and evidence of youths' resilience; (d) a Core Skills Checklist based on the filmed therapy sessions; (e) annual updates of the the DTD Clinician Toolkit and DTD Assessment & Treatment Update.
University of Connecticut Health Center/Psychiatry
The Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice (CTRJJ) provides training and education to initiate and enhance trauma-informed services and treatment for youth in or at risk for involvement in juvenile justice that is: (1) grounded in implementation science; (2) supports active partnership with youth and families; (3) prioritizes racial/ethnic and identity-related diversity, equality, and inclusion; and (4) enhances systemic engagement of system stakeholders in change process via three elements. (E1) Trauma-Informed Resource Enhancement and Development for Youth and Families (TI-READY): disseminating NCTSN resources to enhance knowledge of trauma-informed practices. (E2) Trauma-Informed System Engagement (TI-PREP): a system-level engagement model utilizing innovative trauma-informed trainings including Think Trauma and needs assessment and strategic planning using the Trauma-Informed Juvenile Court Self-Assessment (TI-JCSA). (E3) Trauma-Informed System Transformation (TI-ATTAIN): supporting collaboration between behavioral health and juvenile justice providers and organizations to effect trauma-informed system change through implementation of evidence-based practices with youth and families including, Trauma Affect Regulation-Guide for Education and Therapy (TARGET) and Trauma and Grief Components Therapy for Adolescents Grief Modules (TGCTA-GM). CTRJJ will provide resources, training, and technical assistance to more than 2000 youth/family serving programs and 10,000 professional/peer service providers to enable them to more effective serve > 50,000 traumatized youth and family/caregivers, as well as provide more than 400 public and professional TIJJ training, education, prevention, and mental health promotion products and presentations.
University of Illinois at Chicago, Urban Youth Trauma Center, Institute for Juvenile Research
The Urban Youth Trauma Center (UYTC) at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is a Treatment Service Adaptation Center that promotes and disseminates comprehensive, integrated, and coordinated care for multi-problem, high-risk youth affected by trauma and community violence. UYTC aims to increase awareness about the needs youth who are affected by community violence, youth with co-occurring substance abuse, disruptive behaviors, and those who are involved with court, juvenile justice, and law enforcement systems, while emphasizing the enhancement of community resources and service system collaboration. UYTC disseminates trauma informed intervention models designed for multi-problem youth experiencing traumatic stress, violence exposure, and co-occurring substance abuse (using Trauma Systems Therapy for Adolescent Substance Abuse or “TST-SA”) and disruptive behavior problems (using S.T.R.O.N.G. Families and Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S.) as well as prevention training and programming which promotes the use of best practices for trauma-informed violence prevention among youth service providers within targeted communities. Through its newly funded grant, the Innovative Guidance for Neighborhood Initiatives for Trauma-Informed Effectiveness (IGNITE) aims to provide specialized training, education, and consultation to youth-serving providers enabling evidence-based intervention and prevention approaches across the continuum of behavioral health needs of underserved urban youth - especially low-income ethnic minorities - who are impacted by traumatic stress, community violence, and co-occurring conditions of internalizing substance abuse and externalizing behavior problems.
University of Kentucky Secondary Traumatic Stress Innovation and Solution Center
The Secondary Traumatic Stress Innovations and Solutions Center (STS-ISC) is housed at the University of Kentucky Center on Trauma and Children. The STS-ISC will provide workforce development and protection assistance to NCTSN centers, and other child-serving sites to address the impact of Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) on trauma professionals so they can provide effective and quality care to children with traumatic stress conditions. This STS-ISC will support wide scale dissemination and implementation of existing and to be developed evidence-informed intervention products to address STS, and expand the application of these interventions to a new population, resource parents, who have high levels of untreated STS. This will be accomplished via the following activities: 1) Implementing workforce development and protection initiatives to create STS informed workplaces by developing an organizational change package and implementing data driven, organizational STS change processes; 2) Increasing supervisors’ abilities to serve as STS change agents and boundary spanners by creating training and assessment strategies; 3) Providing professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to manage STS using evidence-based interventions and an advanced, web-based, STS curriculum.; 4) Providing resource parents with the skills needed to manage STS by creating a targeted training curriculum; and 5) evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions on STS at the organizational and individual level. A full evaluation protocol including process and outcome measures of performance is fully integrated into the work of the center. The project will provide, direct, intensive training and support to 1040 professionals, but will create publically available, free tools and resources available that are accessible to an unlimited number of people in the larger, global community of trauma workers and resource parents.
University of Maryland School of Medicine, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Baltimore-Network of Early Services Transformation (B-NEST) will strive to prevent and support recovery from traumatic stress in very young children through 1.) collaborative care and integration of early childhood trauma prevention, detection and intervention in pediatric primary care, 2.) evidence-based early childhood trauma interventions, and 3.) partnership with families, community elders and cross sector providers to raise awareness and prevent and respond to symptoms of traumatic stress in children ages 0-5 and their families in Baltimore City. We will implement HealthySteps in the University of Maryland Medical Center’s pediatric primary care program and innovative trauma screening, education and attachment-based, developmental guidance tools. We provide two-generational, evidence-based trauma treatment (Child Parent Psychotherapy, TF-CBT) and attachment-based and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) parent education interventions (Attachment Vitamins, ACE Interface). By applying implementation science strategies and creating interprofessional training, we will increase the primary care sites capacities and future workforces to provide child and family traumatic stress resources and implement trauma informed practices in the primary care setting through partnerships with NCTSN Category II Centers (Child Trauma Research Program, Family Informed Trauma Treatment Center, Pediatric Integrated Care Collaborative and NCTSN Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma). In partnership with local grandparents, our community health worker and community programs will increase community engagement and access to family education and public awareness through community-based, peer-led engagement interventions and workshops to promote social and racial inequities in health promotion.