Enhance Early Engagement (E3) Training for CAC Victim Advocates 

NCA will be hosting an information call on Tuesday March 4, 2025, from 2:00pm-3:00pm EST to provide information on content, schedule, and training requirements.  For CAC senior leaders and advocates, this call is an opportunity to learn more about the training and have any of your questions answered.  

Training Period: April-June 2025 

Description: 

Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) across the nation are at the forefront of addressing child maltreatment. We know that child maltreatment can cause significant mental health effects on children, such as post-traumatic stress or disruptive behavior disorders. Further, as demonstrated in National Children Alliance’s (NCA’s) Thriving Kids 2019 report, evidence-based mental health services (also collectively known as evidence-based practices, or EBP) make a huge positive impact on children’s well-being. 

Yet not all families served by CACs receive these critical services. Through feedback from caregivers collected under NCA’s national Outcome Measurement System (OMS), we know some families report never receiving information about mental health services for themselves or their children. Thankfully, that number is falling, but even more concerning is that many of the families who do report receiving information about treatment options for children and caregivers still fail to follow up on referrals to these essential services after visiting a CAC. 

Of course, sometimes this is due to concrete barriers—time, transportation, money, or availability concerns. But alarmingly, many family members report not seeking mental health services for themselves or their children because they are not convinced it’s necessary or important, that non-evidence-based services are just as good, or that they can go it alone. CACs can offer the best mental health services in the world, but if children and families don’t use them, they may never have the chance to fully recover from the trauma of abuse. This is the critical role of the victim advocate in the CAC setting: family engagement with treatment starts and ends with advocates. 

About The Project 

Enhancing early engagement of families in mental health assessment and evidence-based trauma treatment is a priority for CAC leaders through NCA. To address this need, NCA partnered with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Utah and the Center for Safe and Healthy Families at Intermountain Healthcare’s Primary Children’s Hospital on a training initiative, Enhance Early Engagement Training for CAC Victim Advocates, or E3. E3 aims to increase the proportion of children and their caregivers served by CACs who engage in mental health services. 

CACs and their victim advocates helped us design this program to meet their needs and practice styles. In 2019, more than 1,500 victim advocates and CAC directors shared detailed feedback about current practices and remaining needs around family engagement in surveys. Victim advocates indicated the need for structured training in best practices for mental health screening, evidence-based treatment identification and referral, and evidence-based engagement strategies. This training opportunity provides a new and enhanced version which was modified based on feedback from Victim Advocates and Senior Leaders from across the country who have participated in training. 

For the Spring 2025 cohort, we will be introducing a new screener to the advocates. The Care Process Model for Pediatric Traumatic Stress (CPM-PTS) was developed through a collaboration of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Utah and the Center for Safe and Healthy Families at Intermountain Healthcare’s Primary Children’s Hospital.  CPM is a brief screening and response protocol guiding the identification of, and response to, traumatic stress in children seen in pediatric settings, including Children’s Advocacy Centers.  CPM uses several different tools to screen for trauma exposure (recent and remote events), suicidality and self-harm, and traumatic stress symptoms. 

Please note that there is a requirement to submit project-related data. 

The child victim and their family will be: 

1. Screened and referred for a mental health assessment as needed. 

2. Referred for evidence-based treatment based on the needs identified through the screening and assessment. 

3. Engage in appropriate treatment through attendance and participation toward successful completion. 

4. Partnered and collaborate with the CAC to assess/monitor progress and celebrate success. 

To bolster the important work victim advocates already do with families, the focus of the current project is to provide training to victim advocates in trauma responses, brief mental health screening, evidence-based trauma-focused treatments, identification of treatment needs, referrals for mental health services, and evidence-based engagement skills.