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Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect
Clinical Services
For more information about our clinical programs, please visit the Kempe Center Website.
Kempe Child Protection Team
The Kempe Child Protection Team offers comprehensive, multidisciplinary consultation, assessment, treatment and referral services for children and adolescents who may have been physically or sexually abused or neglected. The University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics is one of a few academic institutions in the country that offers specialty child abuse training for board-certified pediatricians in a structured fellowship program. The Kempe Child Protection Team provides services to 700 children and their families annually in the Denver metropolitan area, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas.
Infants in Foster and Kinship Care
The Kempe Infants in Foster and Kinship Care program provides innovative clinical services to extremely vulnerable abused and neglected babies in the city and county of Denver and has served 250 babies since its inception. Built on a citywide partnership developed with the Denver Department of Human Services, the City Attorney's office and many community agencies in Denver that serve these infants, this program works to ensure that these infants receive the urgently needed developmental, medical and mental health care which they would not otherwise receive. Additionally, the clinical program is part of a larger clinical trial that will test the effectiveness of the intervention.
Fostering Healthy Futures
The Kempe Fostering Healthy Futures (FHF) program assesses the academic, mental health and social functioning of preadolescent youth in foster care and provides them with mentoring and therapeutic skills groups to improve their outcomes. The long-term goals are to reduce adolescent risk behaviors, such as delinquency, substance use and sexual risk behaviors, and to improve academic achievement, mental health and social functioning. FHF provides training to graduate students in social work and psychology.
Foster Care Clinic
The Foster Care Clinic provides comprehensive medical care to abused and neglected children in foster and kinship care and has established partnerships with community programs that enable the clinic to examine the health of children in foster care and determine whether they are receiving the medical care they need. The Primary Care Clinic serves children aged birth to eighteen years old who live in foster and kinship care in the Denver metropolitan area. To date, 68 children have been seen.
Under Sixes
A new project called "Under Sixes" provides mental health services to children aged birth to five years old in the child welfare system in Denver. The uniqueness of this project is to combine child welfare assistance to keep children safe while offering mental health services to the children to protect their emotional development. Training and consultation services are provided to caregivers and to professionals who work within or collaborate with the child welfare system. The Kempe mental health clinicians also work collaboratively with caseworkers, learning their system and consulting on emotional development issues.
Perpetration Prevention Program
The Perpetration Prevention Program provides treatment for local youth and their families and provides support, information, consultation and training to local and national colleagues, communities and policy makers regarding the identification, management and treatment of juveniles who have sexually abused children. By focusing on the development of abusive behaviors, all activities are designed to reduce the risk of child abuse today and in the next generation. The National Adolescent Perpetration Network serves almost 1,000 members nationwide and draws more than 500 people to its annual conferences. Two thousand professionals, parents and adolescents will be served by this program, locally, nationally and internationally each year.
Kempe Therapeutic Preschool
The Kempe Therapeutic Preschool is a highly specialized treatment program that helps severely emotionally disturbed children aged three to six years old who have been abused and neglected. The Preschool provides a full range of mental health services that help the children graduate to regular school settings. The Preschool is also an important site for training future clinical experts in treating young abused and neglected children, and it is closely linked with the Harris Training Program, a postdoctoral fellowship in infant mental health, consultation and psychiatric treatment at the University of Colorado Denver.
Kempe Community Caring Program (CCP)
The Community Caring Program provides a unique intervention service with the development of a postpartum depression support group targeted toward new mothers and their infants. This support group is one of a kind in the Denver metropolitan area and, to our knowledge, in the state of Colorado. The intervention program is designed to provide an immediate support service to mothers suffering from postpartum depression and at risk for harming their infants either emotionally or physically.
Kempe Training, Education and Consultation
Competency-based training and education is provided for future leaders in medicine, law, social work and mental health in the effort to reduce child abuse. Fellowship positions are recruited nationally. We provide training workshops to child welfare caseworkers statewide, which are needed due to the high turnover rate of 33-50% per year in these positions. START (State and Regional Team on Crimes Against Children) provides multidisciplinary consultation services offering the expertise of the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect to professionals on extreme and complex child abuse and neglect cases, usually in litigation in civil or criminal courts. Direct clinical assistance and advocacy are provided in response to requests from professionals and the public, with information and assistance based on the research of court decisions, clinical studies and years of clinical and legal experience in child abuse and neglect.
Kempe Policy Program
The major focus of the Kempe Policy Program is to conduct empirical research to improve federal and state policy for abused and neglected children. The second focus of the Program is on advocacy for abused and neglected children, often in collaboration with the Kempe Foundation for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect. A third focus is to provide the operational capabilities that support the Denver Platform, which refers to a set of relationships and agreements that enables us to potentially work with every abused and neglected child in the city and county of Denver. This is a new program that has developed from our recent nationally recognized success in conducting policy-relevant research and our long history of advocacy on behalf of abused and neglected children.
Community Outreach Program
The Community Outreach Program designs, implements and promotes public education and outreach programs to meet identified community needs. The Program reaches out to public and professional audiences to help prevent child abuse and neglect. Activities are designed to support the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect's mission and goals; collaborate with professional organizations and community agencies in organizing, developing and promoting child abuse prevention; and facilitate the effective dissemination of information regarding child abuse to the community.
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