REACT FY23 SM 23 010 National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative Category III - The University of Chicago Medicine REACT Program Recovery & Empowerment After Community Trauma represents a response to Chicago’s greatest ongoing public health challenge violence. Based in an urban children’s hospital, UCM REACT will address behavioral health disparities by providing African American patients affected by community violence with traditional evidence-based treatment as well as new community- and culturally-driven services. The University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) is a leading academic medical center located on Chicago’s South Side in one of the most racially and economically segregated cities in the US. Many neighborhoods in the UCM Service Area, affected by decades of disinvestment and racialized structural violence, face some of the highest levels of poverty and violent crime in the city. Due to the prevalence of violent crime in their communities and Chicago’s chronic struggles with gun violence, the day-to-day lives and health of many children served by UCM are shaped by community violence. It is not uncommon for patients to have witnessed shootings or to have lost a loved one to violent death. Even when directly unscathed by such events, children and their caregivers frequently worry about their own safety. Despite widespread awareness of the impact of violence, services to support children and families as they cope with it are scarce. Clinical services that specifically address the traumatic effects of violence remain unavailable for the vast majority of affected children. Children’s trauma-related emotional and behavioral difficulties are often misdiagnosed, resulting in them receiving ineffective intervention or no intervention at all. The UCM REACT Program addresses these trauma-related behavioral health disparities by identifying hundreds of patients affected by community violence, whether or not they have sustained physical injuries, and providing access to a range of trauma-focused and trauma-informed services for them and their families. UCM REACT Program clinicians will conduct assertive outreach and trauma psychoeducation with all violently injured patients under 19 presenting to UCM’s pediatric and adult Level 1 Trauma Centers, as well as any patients encountered in a variety of UCM inpatient and outpatient settings, including the Comer Children’s Hospital Pediatric Emergency Department, the Department of Psychiatry Consultation/Liaison Service, and the Comer Children’s Hospital Pediatric Medical Mobile Unit, and Pediatric subspecialty clinics. Following trauma screening, support, and psychoeducation, patients and families affected by community violence will be linked to a weekly interdisciplinary clinic that provides trauma-informed psychological and psychiatric needs assessment and/or to NCTSN-developed interventions, including the Child & Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI); Attachment, Regulation, & Competency (ARC) and Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP). In addition to these interventions, UCM REACT will develop capacity to offer community- and culturally-driven services for youth and families for whom traditional office-based EBPs are not desired, indicated, or feasible: Dr. Obari Cartman’s manhood development groups for young Black men, MANifest, and Dr. Marva Lewis’ Parent Café curriculum, Talk, Touch & Listen While Combing Hair. It is anticipated that these community-based approaches will promote racial healing and increase the likelihood of subsequent engagement in ongoing REACT Program services. The UCM REACT Program will serve at least 350 children and their families annually (1,750 during the grant period) each year providing screening, support, and psychoeducation for 300 individuals, psychological and psychiatric needs assessments for 40, medication management for 40, trauma-focused EBPs for 125, and community-based, culturally-driven groups for 40.
