Thursday, December 26, 2024
12/26/2024
The Rutgers Child Trauma Clinic (hereafter referred to as the CTC) at the Center for Psychological Services (CPS), will be a specialty clinic that will serve youth ages 3-18 that are impacted by trauma and represent a lower socioeconomic demographic group of families in need of low or no cost services. Youth served in the program will be those demonstrating increased risk as evidenced by their family involvement with the state child welfare system, school disciplinary team, or identified by a community organization or family member as having significant challenges that are linked to suspected or known trauma. CPS is the training clinic for the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers and is a top ranked doctoral psychology program in the nation. In 2019, New Jersey (NJ) published a report about adverse childhood experiences in the state. The report, entitled “Adverse Childhood Experiences: Opportunities to prevent, protect against, and heal from the effects of ACEs in New Jersey,” shared that over 40% (approx.. 782,000) of children in New Jersey have experienced at least one adverse childhood experiences(ACE) and 18% have experienced multiple ACEs. Also, 27% and 22% of African-American and Hispanic children have experienced multiple ACEs, respectively, compared to 18% of their white counterparts. As a result of these findings, NJ identified five areas of opportunity to address childhood trauma in the state. Among these included support for parents and caregivers in receiving trauma-focused education and support, and providing evidence-based treatment for traumatized youth. (New Jersey Funders ACEs Collaborative, July 2019) Furthermore, Middlesex County, NJ, where the CTC will be located, continues to rank in the top three counties for new cases and deaths linked to covid-19, disproportionately affecting the traumatic loss exposure of ethnic minority communities. The CTC will offer several trauma-focused treatments to address the impact of trauma and loss, behavior management, sexual abuse and stress management for youth and their caregivers. Individual, family and/or group sessions utilizing trauma and attachment-informed treatment modalities will include Trauma Focused- Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT), the Attachment, Regulation and Competency (ARC) Framework, and Game-Based CBT. The CTC will implement the Core Curriculum on Child Trauma as the foundational approach for the selection and process of treatment modalities and will ensure CTC providers are also trained in Psychological First Aid in order to assist as community responders if an event occurs that has a significant psychological impact on the community. The selected interventions have been demonstrated to be effective with these diverse populations, a critical factor for serving youth in the CTC catchment area of Middlesex County which is the 2nd most populous and most diverse county in NJ. In Year 1, we expect to start off serving 105 youth and caregivers and scale up to 163 individuals each year thereafter, ultimately serving 757 children and caregivers impacted by trauma by the end of the grant cycle.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).