The Early Trauma Treatment Network

-
Investigator: Alicia Lieberman, PhD
Sponsor: SAMHSA Center for Mental Health Services

Location(s): United States

Description

The Early Trauma Treatment Network (ETTN): Raising the Standard of Care for Young Children 0–5 will address the needs of traumatized young children and preschoolers by raising their standard of care and by enabling increased access to evidence-based trauma treatment for them. ETTN will work to build early trauma competence in the systems serving these children. Statistically, young children and preschoolers have a higher exposure to trauma; and they are the most defenseless due to developmental vulnerability, and dependency on parents and/or caregivers. ETTN will:

1) address training and service gaps by engaging in activities that promote workforce development;
2) create culturally competent products, resources, and training protocols; and 
3) build mechanisms for collaboration across the mental health, pediatric care, early childhood education, early intervention, child welfare, judicial, and military systems. 
ETTN is a collaborative of four national programs. All ETTN sites will provide training in Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), a manualized, evidence-based intervention for young children. To improve access to services and to raise the standard of care for traumatized young children and preschoolers, ETTN will build training infrastructure and conduct five Learning Collaboratives with NCTSN Centers and community-based programs—focusing on American Indian providers, military family providers, distance learning technologies, Train-the-Trainer Learning Collaboratives to increase CPP capacity in training and supervision, and national Learning Collaboratives with tracks for Spanish-speaking providers. Additionally, ETTN will create educational and training materials for parents, childcare providers, and service providers for military families; and will collaborate with the NCCTS and with NCTSN Centers in cross-site evaluation, training, and dissemination. Over the course of the grant, ETTN will provide training related to early childhood trauma to 40,000+ service providers and CPP training to a minimum of 480 mental health practitioners.