Child and Family Disaster Research Training and Education

Principal Investigator: Betty Pfefferbaum, PhD

Abstract:

In less than a decade, the United States has seen large-scale domestic terrorist attacks, terrorist attacks against Americans abroad, increases in school shootings, and many large-scale natural and man-made disasters.

These events have heightened our awareness of the need for research-based knowledge related to all aspects of child and family disaster mental health. Two major federal initiatives have, within past months, brought to the forefront the importance of children, families and schools in building our nation's disaster/terrorism preparedness and response capacity.  The ''National Bioterrorism Preparedness Program Cooperative Agreement Guidance for FY2003" by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Bureau has now included language instructing states to address issues of mental health and to pay special attention to children in their planning because children are more susceptible to the consequences of terrorism and disaster. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Education has announced the "Emergency Response and Crisis Management Grant Program" for local education agencies to improve and strengthen their crisis plans to include all four phases of crisis management: mitigation/prevention, preparedness, response and recovery; and to have comprehensive plans that include all possible catastrophic events and hazards. This grant application proposes to develop and implement a state-of-the-art training and education program that will, over the next five years, substantially enhance our nation's capacity to plan and conduct developmentally sound and scientifically rigorous research that can inform and guide our national disaster preparedness and response efforts for children and families.

The Terrorism and Disaster Branch (TDB) of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress (National Center), along with its collaborative partners within the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (Network), will provide the special expertise and combined resources to successfully achieve the goals of this RF A in regard to children and families. There are sufficient complex and strategically important research issues to warrant a specific grant dedicated to disaster research on behalf of children and families. The National Center is supported by SAMHSA to coordinate a collaborative network of 36 independently funded sites to improve the standard of care and access to services for traumatized children and their families. The National Center's Terrorism and Disaster Branch (TDB) is likewise dedicated to a similar mission specific to disaster and terrorism. This grant will provide the dedicated resources to develop and deliver comprehensive disaster research training and mentorship, an objective that is not supported under the current SAMHSA funding. We will integrate these efforts with other grantees to develop an integrated approach to research across the life cycle of the program and a wide-range of community settings. 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.

Specific Aims:

1. To generate understanding of, and demand for, chi1d- 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, for example, State Mental Health Directors, State Health Directors, School District Superintendents, and Institutional Review Boards.

2. To conduct an Integrated Training Program (ITP) employing a staged modular curriculum for Local Multidisciplinary Research Teams (LMRTs) that will include regional and local professionals in the disciplines of health, public health and mental health personnel, academic child mental health researchers, primary care medicine and nursing. In year one, LMR Ts will be fonned, trained and field tested within two different settings, urban and suburban communities. A rural community will be included in year two. These LMRTs will facilitate rapid research in the aftennath of an event. Thorough evaluative processes will ensure that each subsequent training incorporates feedback and new developments in the field. Ten LMRTs will be created over five years.

3. To establish a specialized mentoring and technical assistance capacity, through Regional Mentoring Teams (RMT), that draw :trom existing resources within the TDB and Network. This will provide researchers and communities across the United States with rapid and sustained support in identifying research opportunities and questions, design, implementation, analysis of collected data and dissemination of findings to all disciplines related to child and family disaster mental health, as well as the public sector.

4. To use the relationships established between the Local Multidisciplinary Research Teams and the TDB and Regional Mentoring Teams to integrate the LMRTs into the TDB and Network structure. This will augment the capacity of the TDB and Network to conduct child disaster mental health research following future events.

5. To design and implement flexible, cost-effective delivery mechanisms for face-to-face training, continuing education, and team-building, through workshops, teleconferencing, online distance education, electronic resources, and mentoring.

6. To design a modular, multidisciplinary research-training curriculum on child and family disaster mental health incorporating modem principles of public mental health and a scientifically informed developmental psychopathology model. The curriculum will cover theoretical and applied issues (including ethical considerations) related to current knowledge, hypothesis fonnation, research design, methodology, analysis, implementation and reporting.

Participant Inclusion Criteria:

Participant Compensation:

Contact Information:

Betty Pfefferbaum, PhD (405) 271-5121 Ext 47673