After three and a half years of operations, we’re beginning to amass a rich dataset that has the potential to provide insights into the impact of the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI). Although we are continually evaluating our outcomes, we recently wanted to take a more historical look at our agency’s CFTSI data to evaluate the impact of the practices we’re using in Project CONTACT.
It is important to note that with the advent of this project, our agency consulted closely with the Yale Study Center (the developers of CFTSI) to ensure we were following best practices and using their evidence-based procedures. This resulted in us changing some of our protocols and assessments. Additionally, to help remove some of the case management burden from our clinicians (as well as helping remove barriers to treatment for families), we have now implemented the services of our Family Engagement Specialists (FES).
With the initiation of Project CONTACT, we are more closely documenting graduation rates and dispositions. We don’t have those exact data points for clients served prior to Project CONTACT. Nevertheless, because CFTSI is a manualized evidence-based modality, we know that, for the most part, families will have graduated after completing at least five sessions. Therefore, we ran an analysis that looked at the number of families that had five or more CFTSI sessions both pre- and post-CONTACT. The result was as follows:
A formal chi-square analysis revealed that there are more than expected number of families that did not graduate pre-CONTACT and more than expected number of families that did graduate during CONTACT { χ2(1, 724) = 4.01, p = .045}.
Some other interesting differences we found included:
There were no significant pre-/post-CONTACT differences in the number of no-showed sessions.
Taken collectively, these data seem to indicate that not only is CONTACT facilitating more graduations than we’ve had in the past, but is also providing families additional treatment time in terms of both number of sessions and number of service minutes.