Resources for Trauma Informed Care

This past week I attended a conference held by the National Association of Children's Behavioral Health. The conference was entitled  tools for Implementing and Sustaining Trauma Informed Care the faculty were from the National child Traumatic Stress Network:

Jane Halladay Goldman, PhD. Director of Service Systems, NCTSN
Lisa Conradi, PsyD. Clinical Psychologist Chadwick Center for Children and Families, San Diego
Pam Toohey, founder, Birth Parent Association, San Diego
Erika Tullberg, MPA, MPH Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine

I want to make sure that you all realize the great wealth of information and resources that is available on the NCTSN website, www.nctsn.org.

Here are some examples:

Child Welfare Trauma Training Toolkit Curriculum for child welfare workers
Cops, Kids and Domestic Violence Training video for police officers
Caring for Children who Have Experienced Trauma- a Curriculum for Resource Parents
Psychological First Aid a print and on line evidence informed approach to enable first responders to meet the immediate needs and concerns of disaster survivors
Child Trauma Tool kit for Educators Guide for school administrators, teachers, staff and parents wih basic information for working with traumatize children in the school setting
Ten Things Every Juvenile Court Judge Should Know About Trauma and Delinquency technical assistance bulletin highlighting crucial facts judges should know to meet the needs of traumatized children within the court system

Master Speakers Series, with free CEUS, on such topics as:
Creating Trauma-informed Service Systems, with speakers including Alice Lieberman, Steve Marans, and Glenn Saxe.

Secondary Traumatic Stress with subjects including Organizational Secondary Traumatic Stress, Disaster and Terrorism Settings, Cultural Implications and is available in Spanish.

Family Systems, with speakers including Charles Figley, Joseph Spinazzola, and subjects such as evaluating and including families.

Screening and Assessment in the Juvenile Justice System and Screening and Assessment in the Child Welfare Setting, with information about measures to use, how to use measures to guide planning, how to assess child-parent dryads, perspectives from the bench, and using web based screening.

Partnering with Youth and Families in Trauma Settings, which covers engagement, boards, peer-to-peer programs, compensation and capacity building.

There is an excellent series of  information papers on birth parents with trauma histories in the child welfare system. There are papers designed for birth parents, judges, child welfare workers, resource parents, child advocate and mental health professionals.

Then of course there are databases of both measures and evidence based treatments, with facts about each including relevant cultural variables.

NCTSN has created Practice Breakthrough Collaboratives on various topics.  In these groups of stakeholders work together to create change in various areas of practice. The results of these are available on subjects such as "Using Trauma-Informed Child Welfare Practice to Improve Placement Stability". These contain many specific recommendations.

Everything on the NCTSN website is free, or, since it is funded by SAMHSA you might say you have already paid for it. I urge you to explore this valuable resource. There is even more there than I have described.