Northwestern Now: Youth With PTSD Get Relief From Proven Treatment
From Northwestern NOW:
The team of scientists — originally at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) but now at Northwestern University and Stony Brook University — began working with Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services in 2012 to incorporate the use of trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, an evidence-based treatment for young people with PTSD, across the city’s behavioral health system.
The study was successful in two ways: First, patients who received the trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy saw their PTSD symptoms decline an average of 30% from baseline to termination. But the overarching success of the study was in how well the city was able to implement and sustain the therapy’s adoption and reach over 10 years.
“It is mission critical that we learn from effective implementations so that other settings can engage in similar processes to come up with an implementation blueprint that works for their context, clinicians, patients and the ‘thing’ that they are implementing,” said Northwestern implementation scientist Rinad Beidas, who led the evaluation of the study at Penn and is now the chair of the department of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This is a success story with regard to both implementation and effective sustained outcomes and the power of partnership with the community.”