Cincinnati Children's Leads with the First Pediatric Forensic Nurse Program in the Country
The Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children, in collaboration with Department of Patient Services, and through funding from the Ohio Attorney General’s office, created the first of its kind pediatric forensic nursing service. Trauma identification and documentation is an important part of the forensic nurse team training. The forensic nurses provide compassionate care 24/7 to victims of violence, including sexual assault evidence collection, photo documentation of injuries, screening for human trafficking, and chart review for suspected medical child abuse. The team’s goal is to improve the early identification of maltreatment, collect evidence that will protect children from future harm, and facilitate healing though trauma-informed care.
Joining Forces for Children is Breaking Down Silos to Address Childhood Adversity across our Community
The Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children is the backbone organization for a collective impact initiative known as
Joining Forces for Children. Joining Forces for Children is a multidisciplinary group of over 40 organizations and over 300 individuals committed to reducing the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress in the Greater Cincinnati region. Joining Forces for Children has been a springboard for innovative approaches to addressing ACEs and toxic stress in the channels of healthcare, early childhood, school age services, and local initiatives. These four channels of the collaborative work to create opportunities for community partners to think across systems in creative ways and to forge non-traditional partnerships to collectively prevent and reduce the impact of ACEs and toxic stress in our community.
Promoting Family Wellness in Early Childhood Programs
The Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children partnered with 4C for Children and 10 early childhood programs to design and implement a program to prevent and reduce exposure to adversity among children early in life and to promote family wellness. As part of the program, the program trained child care providers on the impact of adversity and resilience on child development as well as the principles of motivational interviewing, which include communication techniques that help motivate people toward healthy behavior change. Child care providers screened families for adversity and protective factors using the Family Wellness Assessment and engaged families in conversations in an effort to build protective factors and help families to access community supports. The early childhood programs also offered eleven on-site parent cafés and parenting workshops to parents, which were overwhelming well-received. Trained parent facilitator led the parent cafés and involved peer-to-peer conversations on topics such as self-care and effective discipline. A professional trained in the Make Parenting a Pleasure curriculum led the parenting workshops and included topics such as discipline, stress, and anger management. Participating families showed improvement in the protective factors of parental resilience and social connectedness.
