The Impact of Child Trauma Therapy Training on Participants

Research on effective treatment for child trauma is considerably ahead of practice, and the interventions with the best empirical support have not been widely used in the field. Since dissemination is urgent, child trauma treatment training programs are proliferating, but data is rarely reported on the impact of such training, either on participants or on their clients. Such data, if gathered and reported, could help to identify promising/effective training methods. This paper reports on the impact of the 5-day “Child Trauma Institute” training program for school-based mental health professionals in NYC following 9/11. In the fist study, seventy-one participants completed an early version of the Compassion Satisfaction and Fatigue (CSF) screening form, as well as a form assessing their child trauma treatment attitudes and practices, at the beginning and again at the end of the training. In the second study, this procedure was repeated with 35 new participants, using the current version of the CSF. The training appeared to have a significant positive impact on participants’ Compassion Satisfaction, with non-significant trends towards reductions in Compassion Fatigue and Burnout. The training also appeared to produce significant gains (with large effect sizes) on many of the competency items. These findings provide preliminary support for the value of this training program.