Building a Trauma-Informed National Mental Health Workforce: Learning Outcomes From Use of the Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma in Multidisciplinary Practice Settings

Objective: The impact of trauma on mental and physical health has long been recognized as a significant public health issue, yet there has been little unanimity about how to best develop a trauma-capable national workforce. The Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma (CCCT) is being used to train a wide variety of mental health professionals and child-serving staff; however, prior data on its effectiveness have been limited to small pilot studies with master’s in social work students. Method: We used 1,908 retrospective pre-post-training evaluations collected from 168 CCCT trainings delivered in multidisciplinary or practice settings between October 2016 and August 2019. Results: CCCT participants reported high levels of satisfaction and statistically significant change between pre and postscores for 8 self-reported child trauma skills (p <.001), with effect sizes ranging from.78 to 1.45. Conclusions: The consistency of positive outcomes across a wide variety of training formats and audiences demonstrates that the CCCT can be implemented successfully in diverse practice settings and thus can be a useful tool for building a trauma-capable, multidisciplinary national mental health workforce.