Early life adversity can affect children's physical and mental health. The Resilience Clinic is a support program for young children and their caregivers who have been exposed to significant adversity, aiming to prevent the harmful effects of stress and improve child health, behavior, and development while also reducing caregiver stress. This study seeks to evaluate the Resilience Clinic, assessing the intervention's impact on child health, behavior, and development and caregiver stress and mental health.
Early-life trauma and related adversities are prevalent and associated with negative health, developmental, and behavioral outcomes in children. Research to design and test practical, scalable healthcare interventions that mitigate toxic stress is needed to promote improved health and developmental outcomes in children.
The Resilience Clinic is an interactive, caregiver-child psychoeducational intervention for parents and other adult caregivers of young children (ages 0-5 years) with exposure to traumatic events or other significant adversity. The aim of this primary-care based intervention is to prevent or mitigate the toxic stress response, thus promoting child resilience in the face of adversity, with the goal of improving child health, behavioral, and developmental outcomes.
The overall aim of this study is to evaluate the the efficacy and operational feasibility of the revised Resilience Clinic (RC). This is a non-randomized clinical trial comparing intervention caregiver-child dyads to a prospective control group drawn from a concurrent clinical trial (NCT05259436, The Collaborative Approach to Examining Adversity and Building Resilience Study (CARE), PI Thakur). In the intervention group, we will conduct pre-post intervention comparisons along with comparisons between the intervention group and the control group drawn from the CARE study. A subgroup analysis will compare two intervention arms (clinic based vs community-based intervention) to each other and the control condition. This clinical trial is supplemented by a mixed-methods quality improvement (QI) tools, including process measures (attendance and billing/claims data) to evaluate operational and financial feasibility; participant surveys/interviews/focus groups to assess acceptability; and analysis of quality improvement meeting notes.
