Cria Care

This page presents details of the collaboration between Colby Pearce and Cria Care, a new therapeutic residential child care initiative in Ireland, in the delivery of a therapeutic model of care.

The nature of this collaboration incorporates ongoing support in delivering the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care (Residential Care Version) as the foundational model of care in Cria Care homes.

This collaboration will include:

A sample training resource is available for viewing and download here.

In his engagements with staff of Cria Care, Colby Pearce focuses on capacity building in the following areas:

• Staff knowledge of how developmental trauma impacts the developing child, and how to support recovery from it;
• What a therapeutic caregiving environment looks like and how to maintain it;
• Organisational capacity to implement the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care with increasing independence, including for new staff training;
• Developing reflective capacity and self-efficacy in the roles played by staff of Cria Care, through regular supervision.

Supervision occurs on a monthly basis for organisational leadership, and for house caregiving staff. Supervision spans two hours, is online, and is intended to:

• provide a containing environment that supports thinking and effective action, in the pursuit of an optimal work environment for, and delivery of, reparative, therapeutic care to children and young people who have experienced developmental trauma;
• reinforce and extend knowledge shared through training with the intent that staff can make sense of the work, their own responses to the work, and proceed with intentionality in the delivery of reparative, therapeutic care;
• Alignment of endeavour in the delivery of therapeutic care across staff, in consideration of inconsistency being a primary trauma trigger;
• Review of information collected via the AURA by Secure Start app, and refinement of approach.

Why The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care?

The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care arose from Colby Pearce’s thirty-five year career as an applied researcher (1991-1995) and Clinical Psychologist (1995-present) working with children and young people who come to the attention of child safeguarding authorities, and adult stakeholders in their lives.

The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care has been implemented in Ireland via the TUSLA (Child and Family Agency) fostering service in Donegal, since 2016. Until recently, it was the primary model of care for the fostering service. Between 2016 and 2018 Colby Pearce travelled to Ireland to deliver training in the Model to TUSLA staff teams in Donegal more broadly, and to staff and invited guests of TUSLA in Monaghan. In 2018 Colby also delivered training in the Model to staff and carers of Five Rivers, Ireland, and trained twelve trainers (6 TUSLA Staff and 6 TUSLA Foster Carers) in the delivery of the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.

The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care incorporates approaches intended to address the following:

• Changing one’s approach to caregiving is hard to start and harder to maintain. Implementing a dedicated model of care can (inadvertently) introduce inconsistency into a therapeutic caregiving system, which is highly disruptive to the equilibrium of children and young people who have experienced trauma at home. As such, a model of care drawn from conventional approaches to care and relatedness are more likely to be maintained over time by individual carers, and between individual caregivers. This a strength of The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
• Support the enrichment of evidence-based, caregiving and relational behaviours that support healing from relational trauma.
• Provide epistemological containment of staff, including knowledge of how trauma at home impacts the developing young person, how to deliver a reparative care environment, and how to problem-solve in relation to behaviours that are not yet understood.
• A reflective approach to therapeutic caregiving.
• Positive outcomes for children and young people, and adults who deliver therapeutc care to them.

Read a peer-reviewed periodical article about the Triple-A Model here.

The Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care is aligned with Colby’s Connected Classrooms program, delivered by his trained trainers in schools in Donegal, and the Responding Therapeutically to Complex and Challenging Behaviours, also delivered by TUSLA staff in Donegal.

Why Colby Pearce?

Colby has thirty-five years experience as an applied researcher and clinician . For all of his years of clinical practice Colby has engaged with children and young people who have experienced abuse, neglect, and other adversities, and adult stakeholders in their life. Colby has developed and delivered therapeutic models of care that have been implemented in Australia and Ireland, and is the author of two books and a number of periodical articles. Colby is the host of The Secure Start Podcast and has relationships with the worlds leading authorities in therapeutic residential child care.