Beyond Access: How to Tell if Your CAC’s Mental Health Services are High Quality
March 24, 2026
By Erin Casey, Ph.D., MSW
NCA Institute for Better Mental Health Outcomes
Every year, Children’s Advocacy Centers across the country provide mental health treatment to over 90,000 children and teens who have experienced abuse. By deploying research-backed, evidence-based treatments such as Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), CACs are preventing and relieving the long-term psychological challenges associated with abuse, such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety.
But, what do caregivers really think about the mental health treatment their children are receiving at CACs? For clinicians, engaging and receiving ongoing input from caregivers as their child progresses through therapy is a critical element of fostering therapeutic alliances that contribute to positive outcomes for kids. For CACs, understanding both what is working well in their mental health programs, and what could be enhanced, helps centers to maximize the effectiveness of those programs.
Research evidence suggests that routinely getting feedback from clients and families enhances client engagement, increases attendance at sessions, and improves mental health outcomes. That’s why getting feedback from caregivers is crucial to realizing the promise of helping kids heal from abuse through mental health treatment.
Enter the OMS Mental Health Services Survey
To help CACs elicit feedback from caregivers about mental health services, NCA created a tool for the Outcome Measurement System (OMS) suite of surveys, the Mental Health Services Survey. Designed to get caregiver feedback about their child’s experiences in a CAC-based or linkage provider mental health program, this survey can be flexibly deployed at almost any point in the therapeutic process. The new tool was launched in late 2024 and has since been adopted by more than 250 CACs.
What Can the Survey Help us Learn from Caregivers?
The OMS Mental Health Services Survey asks caregivers to provide feedback about (among other things) services accessibility, the degree to which clinicians engage caregivers in treatment, how open the clinician is to caregiver input, and about how helpful counseling has been for their child and for their own ability to support their child.
Caregivers can leave comments about what has been most helpful to their child, as well as suggestions for improvement. CACs can also add custom questions that are unique to the center to assess particular aspects of mental health programs of importance to each organization. Mental health survey results are summarized on a tailored dashboard that CACs can use to filter results by time, by child age or other demographics, and by modality (in-person vs. telehealth).
Feedback on Mental Health Services Surveys submitted nationally in the past year has been overwhelmingly positive. For example, over 98% of caregivers agree that their child’s clinician creates a safe environment, and 95% of caregivers rate counseling as “fairly” or “very” helpful for their child, even for kids who just started counseling. Caregivers note things like, “My child has started talking about the feelings she is having. She is showing her emotions now… she wouldn’t talk or even acknowledge emotions before therapy.”
In addition to providing crucial feedback about a center’s mental health program, the survey can serve as a mechanism for highlighting and celebrating the important and hard work of clinicians.
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Curious about the OMS Mental Health Services survey? Find more information on the OMS Learning Page of NCA Engage (login required) or reach out to NCA’s OMS team at .
The NCA Institute for Better Mental Health Outcomes is focused on strengthening the workforce that addresses child trauma. Offering meaningful, measurable value to children, families, clinicians, and the constellation of professionals that assist kids after abuse, the Institute delivers holistic mental health training that’s evidence-based and affordable for Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC)-connected professionals.
Lastly, click this link to be directed to the NCA Institute for Better Mental Health Outcomes Training Calendar for our other learning opportunities.
Erin Casey, Ph.D., MSW, is Program Evaluation Manager with the NCA Institute for Better Mental Health Outcomes. She oversees data collection and evaluation projects like OMS and CAC surveys. Formerly a Social Work professor researching violence prevention, she’s dedicated to helping organizations use data for advocacy and improving their impact.
