The Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division, Children's Community Mental Health Services and Wraparound Milwaukee submits this application for $1,999,429 (over five years) to strengthen gender responsive treatment and service systems for youth and their families impacted by traumatic events. The focus population to be served are youth, ages 12-17, who are witnesses and victims of violence, homicides, and other traumatic events. Services will be delivered in the geographic catchment area of Milwaukee County with a population of 952,085 and encompassing areas of extreme poverty and high racial segregation. The project proposed to serve 150 unduplicated individuals throughout the lifetime of the project. Strategies and interventions include: building the capacity of child serving systems in Milwaukee County in becoming more trauma informed through ongoing staff development in trauma informed care evidence-based practices (EBP); increasing staff awareness and programming capacity with diverse catchment area service providers to deliver trauma-specific, gender responsive treatment approaches for young women and men; implementing electronic clinical prompts, or best practice alerts, in electronic health records to assist in alerting hospital response follow-up with all victims of traumatic events coming into the Emergency Department (ED); and collaborative authorship of refereed journal article(s) on project findings. Project goals are to: strengthen the capacity of local workforce to better understand the nature and impact of trauma and how to use EBPs that promote recovery and healing; partnership with a local health system to increase access to effective trauma-focused treatment and service systems for youth, young adults, and their families; and sustain progress and systems change through engagement, alignment, and assessment. Measurable objectives are to: provide trauma-informed staff development facilitator training for child-serving service systems, hospital partners, and treatment provider administrators and leadership to deliver ongoing EBP training on becoming trauma informed for their staff; provide trauma-informed EBP program facilitator training for treatment providers to enhance and expand trauma informed treatment curriculum; provide gender responsive trauma-informed EBP mental disorder treatment and services for youth; increase appropriate ED consultations to Project Ujima for victims who have been injured due to violence; and proactively engage local, regional, and national audiences and stakeholders in sharing effective trauma-focused treatment and services systems. Anticipated outcomes include: development of a trauma-informed workforce in large child-serving system; systems transition from a trauma-informed to a trauma-responsive workplace setting that informs direct services to youth and their families; increase in the number and diversity of treatment providers delivering gender responsive trauma informed EBP curriculum; increase in the number of consultations from emergency department trauma center and real-time referrals for hospital response and follow-up; and the effective dissemination of project knowledge with stakeholders and wider audiences who can make use of, and benefit from, the information without delay.
