Earlier this month, Benchmarks’ Partnering for Excellence (PFE) Program Manager, Jasmine Cain and Ollie Harris Behavioral Health Center's Director, Katie Munger presented in collaboration at the 32nd Annual Research and Policy Conference on Child, Adolescent, and Young Adult Behavioral Health in Tampa, Florida.
This collaboration began in an effort to assess the need for trauma-informed behavioral health services for adults in Cleveland County. As a result of Benchmarks’ PFE goal to redesign North Carolina sites’ child welfare/behavioral health system, changing the way systems understand the need for accessible, appropriate mental health services for youth and families who have experienced potentially traumatic events. One of the ways PFE does this through working to implement trauma informed practices inside local social service agencies by training social workers to screen child welfare involved youth for trauma and referring those that screen positive to a Trauma-intensive Comprehensive Clinical Assessment (TiCCA). These assessments (TiCCAs) are completed by rostered Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TFCBT) clinicians and provide children and their families with holistic recommendations to improve the child’s functioning and well-being.
Locally, we noticed that many of the TiCCAs clinicians were indicating concern for parents appearing to be either struggling with their own traumas or to understand the impact that their child’s trauma was having on them but had no way of truly measuring or confirming. This led the partnership locally to explore ways to determine if what we were hearing anecdotally had any validity. To investigate, PFE partnered with the Ollie Harris Center (OHC)—a collaborative of BH/MH providers, serving a large portion of adults seeking BH/MH service locally—to implement ACEs screening for all new adult clients during intake. Based on these findings, joint efforts expanded to include trauma and resiliency trainings for staff, implementation of new trauma and resiliency-informed practice with the OHC, and continued efforts to bridge the gap regarding the lack of trauma informed services for adults locally.
Take a glance at our presentation for the Tampa Conference that reviews what PFE found through the taking a closer look at TiCCA recommendations and ACEs results at the OHC among adult clients. See how we used trauma training to enhance resiliency-informed practice strategies and our "next steps" for the partnership.
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