Trauma-informed Collaborative Care for Low-income African Americans With PTSD

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is prevalent in the general population, especially among low-income African Americans. Within primary care settings, PTSD may affect as many as one in four patients. PTSD is among the most difficult and costly psychiatric disorders to treat because it is necessary to go beyond traditional medical care to also address the trauma in patients' lives that interferes with treatment and potentially attenuates treatment benefits. African Americans are also less likely to receive care for mental health problems. Several social psychological barriers (e,g., mistrust in healthcare providers, skepticism about treatment efficacy, negative beliefs in one's ability to cope with PTSD), and logistical barriers (e.g., limited access to care, lack of transportation and childcare, lack of financial resources) impede engagement into care. Thus, a trauma-informed approach to care that emphasizes the promotion of trust, safety, self-efficacy, peer support, cultural competency, collaboration, and coordinates with social services in the community to address logistical barriers is required to treat PTSD in low-income African Americans.

Growing evidence suggests that collaborative care for PTSD in primary care is effective. In two studies (Telemedicine-Based Collaborative Care for PTSD (TOP) and Stepped Enhancement of PTSD Services Using Primary CARE (STEPS-UP)) collaborative care significantly improved outcomes relative to usual care and attributed success in large part to the high levels of patient engagement (100%) associated with strategies to connect patients to care including behavioral activation, problem solving, and motivational interviewing. Three trials showed overall improvements but no relative advantage for collaborative care over usual care. The Coordinated Anxiety Learning and Management (CALM) study of anxiety disorders among civilians showed a trend favoring collaborative care (the effect in the PTSD subgroup was not statistically significant due to the insufficient sample size) but engagement was high (95%). Another trial for veterans Re-Engineering Systems for the Primary Care Treatment of PTSD (RESPECT-PTSD) found no difference between arms. Our recently completed Violence and Stress Assessment (ViStA) trial for low-income patients in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) also found no differential effect. In both ViStA and RESPECT-PTSD, patient engagement was low - only 73% and 62% of patients initiated treatment, respectively. However, in both studies, use of mental health services was significantly higher among the patients who engaged in collaborative care suggesting that adding strategies to boost engagement would increase its effectiveness. Also in ViStA, prior to the intervention, there were significant disparities in care for the African Americans in our sample with rates of minimally adequate care of only 21% compared to Whites (33%). This suggests that a trauma-informed approach that addresses social psychological and logistical barriers may better engage patients, enhance collaborative care, and ultimately, improve outcomes.

The Institute of Medicine has prioritized effective delivery approaches that engage individuals with PTSD. We propose to optimize, culturally adapt, and pilot test a collaborative care intervention that uses a trauma-informed approach to identify specific target mechanisms to improve treatment engagement, and reduce PTSD diagnosis and symptoms in primary care settings that serve low-income African Americans. Specifically, we will test the effectiveness of collaborative care, optimized based on lessons from previous studies, adapted to be culturally relevant for this population, and will directly address target mechanisms (outcome expectancy, coping efficacy, and trust). All components of collaborative care will be delivered by African American care managers (CMs) with the guidance of a local, African American community workgroup. We will compare this PTSD collaborative care with a CM (PCM) approach to minimally enhanced usual care (MEU). We submit this R34 application in response to RFA-MH-16-410, which elicits pilot effectiveness trials for treatment, preventive and services intervention. This proposal is an excellent fit for this funding opportunity because our intervention has potential to substantially impact practice and public health by improving mental health outcomes among African Americans with PTSD in New Orleans FQHCs using an empirically grounded approach. Our three Specific Aims are to:

Aim 1: Optimize, culturally adapt, and implement an evidence-based trauma-informed model of PTSD collaborative care (PCM) compared with MEU for underserved African Americans. We will recruit patients at two FQHCs in New Orleans, LA to assess the feasibility, tolerability, and acceptability of PCM.

Aim 2: Conduct a pilot randomized trial of the optimized/adapted PCM intervention compared with MEU in two FQHCs with 40 African American patients to evaluate its impact on social psychological target mechanisms - outcome expectancy, coping efficacy, and trust in facilitating treatment engagement.

Aim 3: Evaluate the effectiveness of the PCM intervention (compared with MEU) on outcomes - PTSD diagnosis and symptoms (primary outcomes) and use of mental health care and non-medical community services and resources (secondary outcomes) either directly or indirectly as mediated by the target mechanisms before and one year after the start of the intervention.

Preliminary data from this pilot effectiveness trial will pave the way for a larger-scale intervention.