HUNDREDS have benefited from psychosocial services since Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) opened the doors, just more than a year ago, of its therapeutic treatment centre for children in State care with mental
conditions.

According to the agency, between January and June 2024, 233 clients — inclusive of children and caregivers — were impacted through a combination of play, group and occupational therapy, as well as psychotherapy, at the centre located on the grounds of Maxfield Park Children’s Home in St Andrew.

Further psychological services provided by the agency for the 2023/24 financial year involved 573 individual psychotherapy sessions carried out by psychologists to assist children experiencing emotional and mental health challenges across parishes.

According to CPFSA, its psychology services unit provided psychosocial services directly to children and staff within children’s homes, where a total of 255 psycho-educational sessions were held. This comprised 174 held with children, and 81 with staff and management of the homes. These sessions impacted the St Augustine Children’s Home, Glenhope Nursery, the Nest, Matthew 25: 40, Maxfield Park, St Andrew Parish Church Home for Girls, Hope’s House, Dare to Care & Martha’s House, Annie Dawson, and Wortley homes.

Topics covered with children included, among other things, reality testing and career guidance, social and emotional learning, conflict resolution, peer cooperation, anger management, emotional regulation, grief management, stress reduction, self-soothing techniques, and positive affirmations. Topics covered with staff included trauma and childhood development, children’s rights, vicarious trauma, adverse childhood experiences, suicide prevention, supportive play and creative movement, attachment, and body-focused interventions.

In addition, 581 children have been screened using various psychological tools such as the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, adverse childhood experiences, and the mobile mental health screening tool.

Chief executive officer of CPFSA Laurette Adams-Thomas said despite those gains, the entity is in the process of further upskilling staff to meet the needs of children in care.

“We want to equip our team members — who have their first degree, for example, but have a passion towards providing service within the CPFSA and would have an interest in areas like play therapy, speech therapy, drama therapy — to actually send them on external training overseas to do their master’s in these programmes,” Adams-Thomas told the
Jamaica Observer in a recent interview.

She said CPFSA is at an advanced stage in its efforts to bring this to fruition.

“One of the things that we are doing now is to explore some of these other areas that would be beneficial to us, and see what arrangement can be made through partnerships with other agencies to have a cohort of our team members trained in these specialised areas to come back and provide services through the CPFSA to our children,” she explained.

In noting that speech therapists and play therapists are a rarity in Jamaica, Adams-Thomas said efforts by the entity to engage additional professionals in the area here have fallen flat.

“We have sought to engage persons within the private sector to come and offer their services but they have a lot of clients and so they are not able to share their time as much — and for the number of children that we have, they would not be able to support us the way we would have wanted. So, we are really trying to see how best we can upskill our team members and ensure that we have a complement of persons with a variety of skill sets that can provide specialised services, based on the needs of our children,” she said.

In the meantime, she said CPFSA is also angling towards making the services of the centre more widely available to the general population, given the demand.

“The purpose of the centre really was to focus on wards of the State but we want to reach the stage where we are actually offering the services to the public. That’s where we want to go, because we know that there is a crisis in Jamaica and so psychosocial therapy, psychological support, would be beneficial overall to other parents and so we are looking to see how best we can equip the CPFSA with the complement of services, skills outside of what just the parents or wards of the CPSFA require,” Adams-Thomas told the Observer.

“We are getting calls; persons have been visiting the centre, have been reaching out to us, so we realise really there is a genuine need for the services, but we want to first take care of our own,” she said.

The agency, in its efforts to improve the psychosocial and therapeutic support for children in the care of the State, launched the therapeutic centre which was officially opened at Maxfield Park Children’s Home on June 29, 2023. The project was executed in partnership with Jamaica Social Investment Fund and Caribbean Development Bank through its Basic Needs Trust Fund. The $200-million centre serves more than 4,600 Jamaican children in publicly funded homes.