CAARE Center Director Anthony Urquiza and his staff developed the PCIT for Traumatized Children Web Course to serve as a primer for mental health therapists interested in learning Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT). The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, through the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, funded the development of the online course.
The CAARE Center advertises the course to mental health professionals and other interested groups via advertising, e-mail listservs and targeted communication to community partners.
The UC Davis PCIT Training Center has been training therapists nationally and internationally to provide PCIT for more than 10 years. PCIT is a mental-health treatment method for young children from 2-7 who engage in disruptive behaviors. The treatment has been proven effective in more than 100 different research studies.
Although PCIT is nationally recognized as an effective treatment and is widely used, there are many more children who need PCIT services than there are therapists trained to provide it. Working with different agencies, Urquiza and staff developed a model for training therapists to achieve competency in both PCIT and training other therapists at their respective agencies. Evaluations of this model showed that the therapists who received the training were able to achieve the same positive outcomes when using PCIT, and their agencies were able to sustain effective programs over time.
The UC Davis PCIT Training Center used this same training model when developing its PCIT for Traumatized Children Web Course — using a combination of didactic, video examples and interactive exercises to give people a basic understanding of PCIT for traumatized children.
The PCIT for Traumatized Children Web Course is available at www.pcittraining.tv. This 10-hour online course will give trainees a solid foundation in PCIT and will partially fulfill the training requirements to be a certified PCIT trainer.
UC Davis Children's Hospital is the Sacramento region's only nationally ranked, comprehensive hospital for children, serving infants, children, adolescents and young adults with primary, subspecialty and critical care. It includes the Central Valley's only pediatric emergency department and level I pediatric trauma center, which offers the highest level of care for critically ill children. The 129-bed children's hospital includes the state-of-the-art 49-bed neonatal and 24-bed pediatric intensive care and pediatric cardiac intensive care units. With more than 120 physicians in 33 subspecialties, UC Davis Children's Hospital has more than 74,000 clinic and hospital visits and 13,000 emergency department visits each year. For more information, visit children.ucdavis.edu.