Evaluation and Impact of Trauma Informed Training on Child Professionals: UMMS Child Trauma Training Center (CTTC)

Abstract

Childhood trauma is one of the leading causes of mental health conditions and poor health outcomes. Timely diagnosis and treatment can therefore have a sizable impact on emotional and physical health. Yet, notwithstanding various state-wide efforts to improve the general standard of child welfare and mental health provision, achieving that timely diagnosis and treatment has proven difficult. One reason has been the limited awareness among childcare professionals and clinicians of trauma-informed care and evidence-based treatments. Providing training to these professionals is an effective means of remedying this problem. Evidence from the CTTC’s extensive training program shows that it boosts professionals’ awareness of trauma, their ability to identify it, and their understanding of how to respond in a trauma sensitive way to this vulnerable population.

This approach is effective not only with clinicians but with a range of professional groups, some of whom have not traditionally been the targets of mental health training. Our evidence shows that police officers, for example, both saw the need for the training that the CTTC provided and benefited from it. Since it is these frontline professionals who are often confronted with child victims of trauma at their most vulnerable times, it is doubly important that they too are trained to identify and to understand trauma and its effects as well as how to respond in a trauma sensitive way. Focusing training only on clinicians already quite well-versed in this area is misguided; greater efficiency lies in simultaneously coordinated outreach effort to train those professional groups who interact the most with traumatized youth on the front lines in identifying and responding to childhood trauma. (Author Abstract)