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Grant to help
doctors treat child trauma
(October
2007 Issue)
By Catherine Robertson Souter
According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, one in
four children will experience a traumatic event by age 16 and many
will be exposed to repeated trauma throughout their childhood: abuse,
neglect, violence or treatment for a life-threatening illness.
For children, especially those who live in rural towns or who are
of lower income, trauma treatment can be difficult to come by because
of a lack of local clinicians trained specifically in childhood
trauma.
In N.H., researchers at The Dartmouth Trauma Interventions Research
Center have been working to ameliorate the problem with a program
to bring trauma expertise to mental health centers across the state.
The center began its work with child trauma with a four-year grant
from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,
or SAMHSA, under a program called the National Child Traumatic Stress
Network, explains Dartmouth College's Stan Rosenberg, Ph.D., a professor
of psychiatry and community and family medicine and director of
the Dartmouth Trauma Interventions Research Center.
Next, a grant from the New Hampshire Endowment for Health allowed
the center to research the possibility of using a video conference
network in order to train clinicians across the state, many of whom
could not take time away to travel to the center's offices in Concord.
A third grant from Fidelity Management helped them to purchase video
conferencing equipment.
In July, the center received an additional $450,000 grant from
the N.H. Endowment for Health to fund the training itself. The grant
will fund three years of training clinicians across the state and,
by the end of the three years, introduce telemedicine to the more
rural areas.
"By the end of the three years, we are going to do actual telemedicine,"
says Rosenberg. "A kid in Nashua could have a childhood psychiatrist
here in Concord do the treatment. Maybe we don't have to have experts
in, say autism, at every mental health center."
The progress to date has been satisfying. The training program
was initiated at West Central Behavioral Health in N.H.'s Sullivan
and Grafton counties. When researchers returned to the agency recently
to find out if the program has helped clinicians, they received
promising feedback.
"In the original grant from SAMSHA, the model was to work in one
mental health center and then adapt from there," says Rosenberg.
"The training there was so popular that they all wanted to be trained.
We've now trained 30 clinicians and they have set up their own internal
groups for mentoring those who follow. When we followed up with
some of the sites and asked if the TFCBT (trauma focused cognitive-behavioral
therapy) model was working, they said, 'the training is as much
a part of our lives as having lunch.'"
"It felt good to hear that this has gained such traction," he
says.
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