Main description:

This comprehensive reference offers a robust framework for introducing and sustaining trauma-responsive services and culture in child welfare systems. Organized around concepts of safety, permanency, and well-being, chapters describe innovations in child protection, violence prevention, foster care, and adoption services to reduce immediate effects of trauma on children and improve long-term development and maturation. Foundations and interventions for practice include collaborations with families and community entities, cultural competency, trauma-responsive assessment and treatment, promoting trauma-informed parenting, and, when appropriate, working toward reunification of families. The book's chapters on agency culture also address staffing, supervisory, and training issues, planning and implementation, and developing a competent, committed, and sturdy workforce.

Among the topics covered:

Trauma-informed family engagement with resistant clients.
Introducing evidence-based trauma treatment in preventive services.

Working with resource parents for trauma-informed foster care.

Use of implementation science principles in program development for sustainability.

Trauma informed and secondary traumatic stress informed organizational readiness assessments.

Caseworker training for trauma practice and building worker resiliency.

Trauma Responsive Child Welfare Systems ably assists psychology professionals of varied disciplines, social workers, and mental health professionals applying trauma theory and trauma-informed family engagement to clinical practice and/or research seeking to gain strategies for creating trauma-informed agency practice and agency culture. It also makes a worthwhile text for a child welfare training curriculum.

Contents:

Introduction: Developing Trauma Sensitive Child Welfare Systems.- Applying Trauma Theory to Agency Practice.- Applying Trauma Theory to Organizational Culture.- The Role of Cultural Competence in Trauma Informed Agencies and Services.- Trauma Informed Family Engagement with Resistant Clients.- System Change Designed to Increase Safety and Stabilization for Traumatized Children and Families: Trauma Systems Therapy.- Use of a Standardized Assessment Tool within Child Welfare: Applications of the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths-Trauma Comprehensive (CANS-Trauma).- Partners in Child Protection: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Assessment in Child Welfare.- Introducing Evidence-based Trauma Treatment in Preventive Services: Child-Parent Psychotherapy.- Working with Resource Parents for Trauma-Informed Foster Care.- Addressing Birth Parent Trauma - Pathway to Reunification.- A Trauma Informed Model for Supporting Pre-Adoptive Placements.- Using Implementation Science Principles to Sustain Trauma Informed Innovations in Program Development.- The Tale of Two Counties United by Pursuit of the Best Interest of Children through Trauma Informed Practice.- Trauma Informed Organizational Readiness Assessment.- Organizational Assessment of Secondary Traumatic Stress: Utilizing the Secondary Traumatic Stress Informed Organizational Assessment Tool to Facilitate Organizational Learning and Change.- Trauma-Informed Strategies for Staff Recruitment and Selection in Public Child Welfare.- Training the Child Welfare Workforce on Trauma-Informed Principles and Practices.- Indirect Trauma Sensitive Supervision in Child Welfare.- Trauma-Informed Professional Development.- Summary and a Vision for the Future.