Fastt - family attachment-focused services, treatment & training - family attachment-focused services, treatment, & training (fastt): an attachment-centered, trauma-informed, equity-advancing, and…

Fastt - family attachment-focused services, treatment & training - family attachment-focused services, treatment, & training (fastt): an attachment-centered, trauma-informed, equity-advancing, and team-based care coordination and workforce development model to support children birth to 12 with significant mental health complications and their caregivers. Fastt is a partnership of the reginald s. Lourie center for infants and young children (LC) and the parent, infant, early childhood (piec) program of the institute for innovation and implementation at the university of maryland (UM) school of social work. Fastt will provide care coordination via a hybrid model of in-person and tele-services as part of a longstanding ecmh community-based clinic (LCC) with a strong evidence base for improving dyadic emotional availability and maternal insightfulness (ZIV, kaplan, & venza, 2016). Children's ecmh challenges include trauma, anxiety, depression, attachment problems, attention deficit, social skill deficits, and disruptive disorders. The impact of the covid-19 pandemic, including lack of in-person education and increased social isolation, and racial injustice has exacerbated already concerning stress levels in children and caregivers and heightened inequities for communities of color. At least eighty percent of children will be medicaid-eligible from montgomery county, maryland and nearby counties. The majority of fastt participants will be from communities of color, with spanish language often spoken at home. Fastt seeks to increase access to ecmh services through effective outreach to link families to ecmh screenings that include, suicidality (safe-t), substance abuse (sbirt), and service intensity (ecsii), as part of a specialized attachment-centered evaluation. Based on the evaluation and treatment planning, children and families will be connected to fitting services, including evidenced based practices (ebps), such as: play therapy, child parent psychotherapy (CPP), and circle of security-parenting (COS-p). Two additional and promising care models, therapeutic nursery program (TNP) - an ecmh prevention-intervention program - and adaptive mentalization-based integrative therapy (ambit) - a family engagement framework from the anna freud national centre, will also be utilized. Fastt will integrate "diversity-informed tenets for work with infants, children and families" (tenets) to guide care. To strengthen the ecmh workforce, fastt trainings will include LCC clinicians, graduate trainees, and community partners. LCC clinicians and trainees will also receive at least weekly reflective supervision. Fastt will collaborate with nctsi-category II and III sites, including the early trauma treatment network (ettn) and UM school of medicine respectively, to advance and adapt interventions to improve engagement and outcomes for traumatized youth. Fastt anticipates serving 50 infants/young children, 75 parents/caregivers, and 50 professionals in year one ramp up; and 100 infants/young children, 150 parents/caregivers, and 100 professionals annually for a total of 450 infants/young children, over 675 parents/caregivers, and 450 professionals for the project lifetime.