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Treatment , Training and Program Development for
Children Youth and Family Services |
Postal address: Box 435 Erindale Centre, 2903 0415379653 ABN: 5216 7151 162 |
Training
and Professional Development
Custom Designed Training
TWI associates are often asked to provide
professional development training for organisations. The content of
the days is determined by the needs of the organization. Workshops that
have been recently delivered are:
· Autism
Spectrum Disorders and challenging behaviours
· Asperger
Syndrome and sexually problematic behaviour
· Responding to young people with sexually
problematic behaviour in out-of-home care
· Advanced
skills for teachers who work with young people with challenging behaviours
· Conflict
in the classroom - how conflict cycles develop and how to avoid them
· Difficult
Conversations with parents, staff and ...
· The brain and behaviour
· Collaborative
Problem Solving
· Trauma
and disability
Other workshops and seminars can be
tailored to meet the needs of practitioners in a variety of settings. Over
the past four years tailored professional development programs have been
provided for schools, treatment programs, juvenile justice facilities, and
child welfare services.
Internationally Accredited Training
The Three Pillars of Transforming Care
About the Three Pillars course
The Three Pillars of Transforming
Care course has been developed for Agencies that wish to ensure that
their staff and carers are informed about and sensitive to, the developmental
impacts of early adversity and trauma. It focuses on the three
core traumagenic needs of children and young
people in special care and education settings and the priorities for
intervention and support. The three primary traumagenic
needs identified are - the need to FEEL SAFE; the need for
positive, trust-based CONNECTIONS with caring adults and
engagement with community and culture; and the need for support to enable
adaptive COPING with external life circumstances as well as
turbulent thoughts, emotions and impulses.
The intent of the course is to provide ‘everyday
and ordinary’ strategies for care providers to therapeutically meet a child or
young person’s traumagenic needs in the other 23 hours.
Developed by Drs Howard Bath and Diana
Boswell, both with extensive backgrounds as practitioners and researchers in
out of home care, the course is now provided across Australia, Europe, Canada
and the USA.
Topic areas covered include:
The fundamentals of trauma theory including
types of trauma, arousal and stress mechanisms, the impact on brain
development, the role of memory and dissociation. It then goes on to look at
the common developmental outcomes of exposure to complex forms
of trauma followed by the three pillars of intervention and support.
Instructional methods include brief
presentations, videos, worksheets, group discussions and practice exercises.
The recently-published
book The Three Pillars of Transforming Care: Trauma and resilience in
the other 23 hours (2018, H. Bath & J. Seita,
Faculty of Education Publishing, University of Winnipeg) provides a resource
and reference guide for course material.
The Three Pillars of Transforming Care
course is delivered in three formats:
1.
A one-day overview of the key concepts can be provided for
interested agencies or groups
2.
A two-day core training targeting direct care or education
practitioners (foster carers, residential workers, teachers, and mentors along
with those who supervise and support them)
3.
A three-day train-the-trainer program that targets more
experienced, senior workers who are in a position to provide training for other
staff/carers/teachers in their own organisations. This training involves two
instructors and up to 25 participants who can be accredited to provide training
within their own organisations for a three year period. Periodic one-day
Updates are scheduled for trainers to maintain their accreditation.
Approximate costs
One-day overview: Instructional costs
are $2,000 (plus GST) plus any required travel and accommodation for one
instructor. The host organisation would need to arrange the venue, AV
equipment, and any food/refreshments for participants.
Two-day core training: Instructional
costs are $4,000 (Plus GST). This includes training materials for each
participant including a copy of the
Three Pillars book
(but not travel and accommodation for the single instructor, or venue/AV
equipment, and food/refreshment costs).
Three-day train-the-trainer courses: Costs and
other course details are negotiated directly with host organisations. This training is provided by Drs Howard Bath and Diana Boswell.
All three course
options are provided through Tact Training and Therapeutic
Welfare Interventions (www.twi.org.au). Both Howard Bath (0423 617
111) and Diana Boswell (0439 461 999) welcome the opportunity to discuss course
content and delivery.
Content of the course
Module 1: Understanding Trauma
· Defining trauma
· Trauma and
developmental harm
· The brain and its
development
· Brain functioning
and integration
· The stress response
and trauma
· Traumatic stress, hyperarousal and dissociation
· Traumatic stress and
memory
· Other impacts on
development and behaviour
Module 2: Safety
· The impact of trauma
on felt safety
· Barriers to creating
safety
· Why we resort to
pain-based behaviours
Module 3: Connections
· Connections, loss
and shame
· Connecting with
‘normality’ and caring adults
· Five everyday ways
of promoting connection
Module 4: Coping
· Healthy and
unhealthy coping
· The place of words
in learning to cope
· Calming and coping
together
· Summary and closure
The Presenters
Dr Howard Bath has been involved in the
provision of child, youth and family services for over 40 years. Trained as a
clinical psychologist, he has worked as a youth worker, manager, and as the CEO
of a child and family services agency. From 1999 to 2008 he was
director of an Institute that provided consultancy and training services for
service agencies around Australia and also worked as a clinician
running programs for adolescents with difficulties around aggression and sexual
behaviour. Howard is widely published in the areas of family
preservation, out of home care, child protection and the impacts of
developmental trauma.
From 2008 to 2015 Howard was the inaugural
Children’s Commissioner of Australia’s Northern Territory where he had a broad
responsibility for the wellbeing of vulnerable children in the child
protection, youth justice, disability and mental health systems. In
2010 he took leave from his Commissioner’s role to co-chair a major government
Inquiry into Child Protection services in the Northern Territory. Howard
currently provides a range of consultancy and training services through Allambi Care for
programs around Australia and overseas. He can be contacted at:
howardb@Allambi.org
Dr Diana Boswell initially graduated from
the Australian National University then undertook graduate clinical and
research degrees in child and adolescent psychology from the University of
Toronto. In Canada she worked in the Toronto school system, child and
adolescent mental health and a secure forensic unit for adolescents.
On returning to Australia Diana worked in a
TEACCH program (early intervention for children with autism or communication
handicaps). After joining the Marymead Child
and Family Centre in 1992 she worked as a clinician, manager and CEO. Later,
working as a consultant, Diana has worked with disability, child protection and
youth justice services providing program development, assessment, training,
research/evaluation and staff supervision. She has developed and taught graduate
university courses and was instrumental in developing therapeutic residential
care programs and treatment programs for young people with problematic sexual behaviors.
She can be contacted at: dboswell@twi.org.au
References
Bath, H. (2015). The Three Pillars of TraumaWise care:
Healing in the Other 23 Hours. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 23(4),
Winter, 2015.
Brendtro, L. & Mitchell,
M.L. (2015). Deep Brain Learning: Evidence-based essentials in
education, treatment, and youth development (pp. 24-26). Champaign
Illinois: Research Press.
Bath, H. (2017). The Three Pillars of Transforming care: Healing in the
‘other 23 hours’
Bath, H.
(2017). The trouble with trauma. Scottish Journal of Residential
Child Care, 16 (1).
Bath, H. & Seita,
J. (2018). The Three Pillars of Transforming Care: Trauma and resilience in the
other 23 hours. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Faculty of Education Publishing,
University of Winnipeg.
Bath, H. (2018). Implementing the Three
Pillars Framework.
Research Evidence for the Three
Pillars
There are three levels of evidence that
support the Three Pillars program.
1. The
Three Pillars program represents a framing of the large research and clinical
literature on the outcomes of trauma exposure and the implications for
intervention. Every proposition in the program is supported directly by
research evidence or contemporary clinical thinking. The supportive research is
detailed in the training manual and some of it is referenced in the accompanying
paper describing the program as well as the published papers (Bath 2008, 2015).
An extensive reference list is also provided for course participants.
The course itself is not based on new ideas
and propositions; its originality lies in the ways existing and widely-accepted knowledge is organised and interpreted
for direct care and support providers who are not themselves, specialist
therapists. The material on which the course is based is found largely in the
work of prominent researchers and theorists such as James Anglin,
Sandra Bloom, Bessel van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, Vincent Felitti, John Bowlby,
Robert Anda,
Larry Brendtro,
Stephen Porges,
Allan Schore, Daniel
Siegel, Louis Cozolino, Martin Teicher, Michael Rutter,
Ann Masten and
many others. Many of these authorities have multiple publications and they
themselves draw on the work of other researchers and clinicians. A
sample of the publications that directly inform the Three Pillars program is in
the attached reference list (the fuller bibliography can be provided).
Where there is not clear research into
a particular proposition or strategy, it will only be included if
there is strong support in the clinical literature. For example, Henry Maier’s
(1992) notion of ‘Rhythmicity’ is included as it has received support in more recent
clinical literature (van
der Kolk, 2014, p. 84).
2. The
phrase ‘trauma-informed’ refers to any program or model that is based on an
understanding of the various types of psychological trauma; on how trauma
impacts the young brain and other domains of development; and on how this
knowledge should shape our approaches to therapeutic intervention and support.
The Three Pillars program seeks to apply these understandings in work with
vulnerable children and young people. There are now numerous
residential care and foster care programs that seek to be trauma-informed. They
draw on the same body of literature (as found in the reference list) and are
based around similar propositions although the programs may differ in emphasis,
target populations, and specific goals. Research into the efficacy of such
programs is at an early stage (as outlined in Whittaker et al., 2015, Section
4), but there are now some promising research outcomes for programs that are
trauma-informed. The Three Pillars program is not intended to be a
comprehensive intervention model as it assumes that programs that use it to
improve their trauma sensitivity will also seek to address normal developmental
needs as well as accepted theory and practice pertaining to all children in
special care settings.
In Australia, an independent outcome study
of therapeutic, trauma-informed care being implemented in a variety of
Victorian services, found that the measured outcomes for young people was
superior on all measures studied to the outcomes of young people in standard
residential care (Verso Consulting, 2011).
It is difficult to be definitive about
outcomes for specific populations because the research to date uses different
methodologies and looks at a variety of specific models and target populations.
However, research based on outcomes from a number of other
trauma-based programs for children in child protection services, including The
Sanctuary program and the CARE program out of Cornell University (Holden,
2009), has demonstrated clear positive outcomes. Bloom and Farragher, 2013, pp. 58-61
list a number of studies that have found encouraging results across a
number of dimensions whilst there are also promising results from formal
evaluations of the CARE residential program (Izzo et
al., in press) in terms of positive adjustment and behavioural data for
children and young
people.
3. The
third level of evidence comes from outcome evaluation surveys from Three
Pillars training programs. The primary goal of the training program is to
empower those who provide care for children and young people in their living
and learning environments. The train-the-trainer program targets those who
train the direct care providers, so the views of these participants about the
effectiveness and relevance of the contents are important. In Australia the training
program has been provided in four states or territories.