(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.