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Spring 2014 . Volume 6 . Issue 2
 



Georgia Begins SafeCare-based Prevention Program

The Georgia Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS), has responded to the call for prevention of abuse and neglect in families with children 0-5 by creating the Family Fusion program.  Family Fusion clients will receive one or two SafeCare modules: all will receiving the PCI (or PII) and caseworkers will determine if Health or Safety is also needed. Family Fusion clients will those who were reported for abuse or neglect, but screened out without substantiation.  GA DFCS has been implementing SafeCare for several years with families who have substantiated cases of neglect or abuse, and is now expanding its use of SafeCare to prevention cases.  The use of PCI/PII alone is supported by recent data from a randomized trial showing that PCI alone provides substantial benefits for families, improving parenting skill and child behavior.
 
Family Fusion officially started in Georgia in October, 2013 and has been met with overwhelming success.  Because there are certified providers throughout the State of Georgia, implementing Family Fusion required no additional training.  The program has been renewed for its second year with the state.
 
 
SafeCare Science with Shannon:
High-Tech SafeCare

Funded through the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Shannon Self-Brown and the research team at NSTRC are studying how technology may help reduce the workload and burden for new trainees implementing SafeCare.  Home Visitors participating in the study are newly trained SafeCare providers and they are provided with an iPad to bring into each session.  Parents interact with the iPad at the beginning of each session to view an online educational program designed for the study, “SafeCare Takes Care.”  The SafeCare Takes Care program uses various forms of media including videos, audio, images, and diagrams, to present parents with the Explain and Model portions of the training sessions. When the parent completes the technology portion of the session, the home visitor leads the remainder of the session to have the parent practice the target skills and provides feedback.
For purposes of the study, 30 Home Visitors will be recruited and half will be assigned to SafeCare as usual and half will be assigned to SafeCare Tech.  The first recruitment site for the project is Holy Family Community Services in Ford City, Pennsylvania.  Data collection is in the very early stages, but by the end of the project, we hope to determine whether new SafeCare trainees feel less burden and have more successful implementation with the technological support.  We look forward to reporting more results as data is collected.  If you would like to learn more about the study, please email Dr. Self-Brown.
 

To Train in Spain

NSTRC recently trained a team of providers to deliver SafeCare in San Sebastian, Spain. The project is a collaborative effort among The University of Basque Country and both local and state government.

Dr. Joaquin de Paul, who leads the project, has been working with the local and state government representatives to improve the quality of the services and to optimize the costs of their services. SafeCare appeared to be a that would provide an excellent return on their investment based on recent findings and economic analyses.

After several months of planning and preparation that included translation and cultural adaptations, Ms. Clorinda Merino delivered Home Visitor training in March 2014. The training was conducted fully in Spanish. There were six trainees, two each from three different collaborating agencies. The Home Visitors were fully engaged and have already started to see families using the SafeCare model.

“We have been able to create a strong SafeCare team,” said NSTRC Trainer Clorinda Merino.Clorinda is currently providing coaching and holding team meetings to discuss cases and any needed adaptations.  In July, Merino will travel back to San Sebastian to provide in-person coaching to the Home Visitors, and will plan for the Coach training to be conducted in September. Stay tuned for updates!

NSTRC is confident that this strong partnership will help the families in the Basque Country improve their parenting skills and prevent child abuse and neglect.
 


SafeCare in Action: A Provider's Story

Sometimes it's rewarding to know that the parents you work with are really listening when you engage them in the SafeCare modules. I had just completed the SafeCare health module with a client. She was a natural. She read the health manual like it was a novel. When it came to going over health scenarios, she could identify, look up and determine the illness, then verbalize appropriate treatment in what seemed like one breath. "Wow, this is great," I thought, but can she put into action to what she has learned? A few days after completing the training, my client told me of an incident that happened when she was taking care of her niece who is three years old. She said that she had fixed some pizza for lunch, then the little girl went into the bedroom to play. It became too quiet so my client went to check on her and found the girl skating bare foot in the bathroom across a layer of comet cleansing powder she had poured on the floor. The little girl was eating a piece of pizza during her skate time, which my client observed as having a mixture of comet and pepperoni covering the top of it. My client said that she scooped her niece up, grabbed the health manual and looked up and called the poison control number. She was told by staff to give the little girl plenty of fluids and watch her for the next couple of hours. My client said that everything turned out fine as the girl had apparently ingested only a very small amount of comet, and she was thankful to have had the poison control number at hand. Since this time we have moved on to home safety with no further incidents. You can probably make a good guess as to what the first item was that my client put out of a child's reach.

Janet Catts has been a Comprehensive Case Manager with ROCMND youth services in Northeast Oklahoma for the past ten years. She is a devoted worker who is dedicated to helping families achieve progress in their circumstances and learn new ways to keep their children safe in their home. 

 

Renowed Scholar in Child Maltreatment Joins CHD


Mark Chaffin, a pre-eminent scholar in child maltreatment, parenting, implementation science and services for disadvantaged and populations with disabilities, has accepted a Second Century Initiative (2CI) faculty position at the Georgia State University School of Public Health in the Center for Healthy Development.

A sought-after speaker nationally and internationally, and scientific reviewer for several federal agencies, Chaffin has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in his career.

Chaffin is currently a psychologist and professor of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. He was the founding editor of Child Maltreatment, one of the two leading journals in the field and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He has been on the editorial boards of or a reviewer for seventeen other journals. Chaffin is a three-time recipient of the Pro-Humanitate Literary Award for Outstanding Published Article in the Field of Child Welfare and Child Maltreatment. He was the primary investigator on the largest and longest treatment outcome trial in the field of child maltreatment, studying some 2,200 families statewide in Oklahoma over seven years and employing the SafeCare service model now headquartered at Georgia State University.
 

New Faces at NSTRC
 
Mike McClelland joins NSTRC as the Director of Strategic Communications where he oversees marketing and communications for SafeCare. He earned a BA in English from Allegheny College in 2007 and his MS in Communication Regulation and Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2008.

Mike has spent nearly a decade working in the field of marketing communications. After completing his Master’s degree in Communications Regulation and Policy at the London School of Economics, he was recruited into the advertising conglomerate WPP’s prestigious international marketing fellowship program. Originally from Pennsylvania, he has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, New York, Chicago, and now Atlanta.

Mike has worked on brand strategy for clients including Pepsi, Nike, Absa, MTN, Prudential, The Economist, BP, DuPont, Citizen’s Bank, UPS, Pfizer, MillerCoors, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Southeast Toyota. His professional and educational specialties include communication regulation, digital strategy, brand strategy, qualitative and quantitative analysis, convergence, end-to-end, user experience, media panics, gaming and gamification, pop culture, sports’ culture, globalization, and the media’s relationship with children.

In addition to work in the marketing communications industry, Mike writes prolifically and has been published in several publications. He is also a singer and has performed around the world with a variety of professional choral groups.
 
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Roddey Jones joins NSTRC as the newest Trainer. He earned a BA in Spanish and BSW at the University of Georgia in 2008, and completed his MPA here at Georgia State University in December.

Prior to joining the staff at GSU, Roddey was a Graduate Research Assistant with Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, also housed in the Center for Healthy Development at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health. At PCA Georgia, Roddey conducted trainings for professionals across the state on mandated reporting and community efforts to prevent child maltreatment. He also has extensive experience working with children and families at the elementary and middle school level in Georgia and abroad in Trujillo, Peru. In addition, Roddey worked as a policy aide at the Georgia General Assembly during the 2013 legislative session.
 
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