Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services

Exploration of Needs

What is Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) and why was an intervention designed to address it?

Several workforce challenges were discussed as opportunities for intervention during the needs assessment  process conducted partnership with the Nebraska Department of Children and Family Services’ (DCFS) to address child welfare workforce turnover.

Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) – Its Impact on the Child Welfare Workforce and Strategies for Agencies to Address It
Posted on November 2, 2021
Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) impacts both child welfare workers and agencies. This blog post highlights this issue and links to videos and tools agencies are using to address STS in the workforce.
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The Implementation Team

Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress

This video features child welfare workers and supervisors discussing the coping skills they use to address secondary traumatic stress (STS).

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The QIC-WD evaluation was conducted with the support of the Nebraska Division of Child and Family Services to determine if an intervention to Address Work-related Traumatic Stress, known as CFS Strong, was effective in improving workforce and child welfare outcomes.

Secondary Traumatic Stress, Burnout and Resilience in the Child Welfare Workforce: Early Results from Nebraska’s Randomized Controlled Trial of Resilience Alliance
Posted on August 9, 2021
Early results from the study of Nebraska's Resilience Alliance intervention indicate that it may mitigate burnout and support resilience among some segments of the child welfare workforce.
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CFS Strong–Building a Resilient Workforce (known as CFS Strong) was the intervention designed as part of the QIC-WD project to address secondary traumatic stress (STS) among child welfare workers and supervisors in Nebraska’s Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS) agency (for more information see the Site Overview). CFS Strong included multiple components:

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is a multi-service agency led by a Chief Executive Officer (CEO), who is appointed by the Governor.  The CEO oversees six divisions including the Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS), which is the state’s child welfare agency. The divisions are supported by centralized operations that include Human Resources (HR) & Development. HR has at least one individual with a strong working knowledge of DCFS operations and who is specifically assigned to provide support solely to DCFS.