$2 Million Grant Awarded to Nationwide Children’s Hospital to Increase Access to Trauma Services

May 12, 2022

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) – Nationwide Children’s Hospital has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to increase access to trauma services in Franklin and Licking Counties.

The grant is part of SAMHSA’s National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative. The goal of the initiative is to transform mental health care for children and adolescents affected by trauma by improving the quality of community-based trauma treatment and increasing access to effective trauma-focused interventions.

The Center for Family Safety and Healing at Nationwide Children’s Hospital will partner with the Early Childhood Mental Health (ECMH) program and Clinical Medical Social Work team, both at Nationwide Children’s, as well as Ethiopian Tewahedo Social Services (ETSS), CelebrateOne, and community behavioral health agencies to provide regional services and national expertise. Increased access to evidence-based treatments, including Child Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), Perinatal Child Parent Psychotherapy (P-CPP) and Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI), is a key objective of the project.

“These funds will allow us to expand our current system of trauma care and improve outcomes by increasing access to services provided in early childhood, or soon after a child traumatic experience,” said Nancy Cunningham, PsyD, Vice President at The Center for Family Safety and Healing. “We are excited to partner with community providers and colleagues to respond to families with a host of traumatic experiences including child abuse and exposure to domestic violence. Our aim is to work with each family in a culturally and linguistically aligned manner to help prevent suffering that can result from untreated trauma. Our work will target immigrant families, those living in rural areas and those presenting to our emergency department or specialty medical services.”

The populations of focus for this grant are infants and young children and their caregivers and expectant mothers, with a history or risk of intergenerational trauma or family violence, and children who have had a recent traumatic event.

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About Nationwide Children's Hospital

Named to the Top 10 Honor Roll on U.S. News & World Report’s 2024-25 list of “Best Children’s Hospitals,” Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of America’s largest not-for-profit free-standing pediatric health care systems providing unique expertise in pediatric population health, behavioral health, genomics and health equity as the next frontiers in pediatric medicine, leading to best outcomes for the health of the whole child. Integrated clinical and research programs, as well as prioritizing quality and safety, are part of what allows Nationwide Children’s to advance its unique model of care. Nationwide Children’s has a staff of more than 16,000 that provides state-of-the-art wellness, preventive and rehabilitative care and diagnostic treatment during more than 1.8 million patient visits annually. As home to the Department of Pediatrics of The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Nationwide Children’s physicians train the next generation of pediatricians and pediatric specialists. The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of the Top 10 National Institutes of Health-funded free-standing pediatric research facilities. More information is available at NationwideChildrens.org