Stress and Secondary Trauma

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.

The Implementation Team

Coach Ohio: A Supportive Supervision and Resiliency Intervention

The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services partnered with select counties to implement a supportive supervision and resiliency intervention. This video highlights the experience of workers, supervisors, and administrators who were involved in Coach Ohio, their intervention to support the child welfare workforce.

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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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Impact of Secondary Traumatic Stress on the Child Welfare Workforce

This video features child welfare workers and supervisors discussing how work-related secondary traumatic stress (STS) impacts them personally and professionally.

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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.

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.