Building a trauma-informed national mental health workforce: Learning outcomes from use of the core curriculum on childhood trauma in multidisciplinary practice settings.

Abstract

The impact of trauma on mental and physical health has long been recognized as a significant public health issue, yet there has been little unanimity about how to best develop a trauma-capable national workforce. The Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma (CCCT) is being used to train a wide variety of mental health professionals and child-serving staff; however, prior data on its effectiveness have been limited to small pilot studies with master's in social work students. We used 1,908 retrospective pre-post-training evaluations collected from 168 CCCT trainings delivered in multidisciplinary or practice settings between October 2016 and August 2019. CCCT participants reported high levels of satisfaction and statistically significant change between pre- and postscores for 8 self-reported child trauma skills (p < .001), with effect sizes ranging from .78 to 1.45. The consistency of positive outcomes across a wide variety of training formats and audiences demonstrates that the CCCT can be implemented successfully in diverse practice settings and thus can be a useful tool for building a trauma-capable, multidisciplinary national mental health workforce. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).