The Terrorism and Disaster Branch (TDB) of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress (NCCTS) proposes a five year program of child focused disaster mental health research education. The goal of this program is to enhance the nation's capacity for conducting rapid post-event disaster mental health research related to children and families through training of researchers and responder organizations in state-of-the-art research methods, particularly in up-to-date methods of needs assessment, data collection for triage and tracking, clinical evaluation, surveillance treatment and intervention, and evaluations of effectiveness. The TDB will use the infrastructure of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) to develop and provide child disaster mental health research training for local, state and national professionals, including psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health educators, nurses and other public health staff, disaster response services, and research personnel, creating 10 fully trained Local Multidisciplinary Research Teams (LMRTs) over 5 years. Ultimately, this training will enhance knowledge in a variety of areas of disaster mental health. Such a step forward will lead to informed clinical interventions and program and policy development to improve the effectiveness of pre-event mitigation, including resilience building for children and families, post-event response and immediate and long-term recovery activities. The goals of this project are: 1) To generate understanding of, and demand for, child- and family-focused rapid research activities in the aftermath of an event through a Universal Training Program (UTP) tailored to the needs of those constituencies that provide review and oversight of proposed research activities and who are positioned to facilitate large-scale implementation of a child and family disaster research agenda. 2) To conduct an Integrated Training Program (ITP) employing a staged modular curriculum for Local Multidisciplinary Research Teams (LMRTs) that will include mental health and other professional personnel, creating a total of 10 LMRTs. 3) To establish a specialized mentoring and technical assistance capacity, through Regional Mentoring Teams (RMTs) that draw from existing resources within the TDB and Network. 4) To use the relationships established between the Local Multidisciplinary Research Teams and the TDB and Network Mentoring Teams to integrate the LMRTs into the TDB and Network structure. 5) To design and implement flexible, cost-effective delivery mechanisms for training. 6) To design a modular, multidisciplinary research-training curriculum on child and family disaster mental health incorporating modern principles of public mental health and a scientifically informed developmental psychopathology model.
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