RCCP in Israel, meeting and presenting on their Therapeutic Crisis Intervention system

January 5, 2015

Linda Avitan, Dr. Renata Gorbatov, Martha Holden, Andrea Turnbull, and Yael Bohak.

Martha Holden (director) and Andrea Turnbull (extension associate) of the Residential Child Care Project (RCCP) visited Israel to participate in meetings with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Services and the National Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) steering committee. They presented on current research and the status of the TCI program to directors, teachers, and residential personnel, compared survey results with Israeli researchers, re-certified Israeli TCI instructors, and visited two residential programs that use TCI. The RCCP's  TCI system provides a crisis prevention and intervention model for residential child care organizations.

TCI Israel continues to be a very effective and impressive model of how government can support residential programs in their implementation of TCI and keep fidelity to the model. Negotiations with the Ministry to adopt TCI as their crisis prevention and management model for residential facilities began in 2002. Since then, TCI has been successfully implemented in twenty-seven facilities and the Ministry hopes to expand the program in the coming year. Considering TCI their most important program, the Ministry has devoted more resources to its implementing than to any other initiative.

Part of the program delivered to Ministry personnel, regional and residential directors, TCI trainers, and residential personnel included results from the U.S. TCI fidelity study examining how agencies implemented TCI and the subsequent impact on staff and programs. Israeli researchers Dr. Renata Gorbatov and Yael Bohak had conducted a similar study in Israeli agencies using TCI with similar findings. There was much discussion about how many more commonalities than differences are found in the residential care agencies across nations.