I recently was invited to a pilot training session for Therapeutic Crisis Intervention or TCI – our crisis management system for our residential units. All Ranch employees who work with our clients are required to take the training. Recently a smaller version of the course was offered to us office staff to get an idea of what our front line workers go through and learn all about TCI.

Our session lasted a few hours, but any new Ranch employee will go through an intense five day course with role playing, written and physical exams. Staff is also required to take refresher courses every year.

Roots
TCI was developed by Cornell University in the 70’s for residential child care facilities. The purpose of it is to provide a model which will assist in, among many other things, preventing crisis from occurring and managing when a crisis does take place.

As you can imagine at the Ranch, we deal with clients who have a variety of problems that require help from competent, trained staff to make sure everyone has a safe and secure environment. Sometimes we cannot prevent a crisis from happening and TCI gives us the steps and procedures to keep both our staff and our kids safe.

Why TCI
The Ranch has used a few systems over the years and continues to adapt how we operate. We don’t believe in corporal punishment, nor will you find isolation rooms, punitive consequences or any forced physical punishment.

We used to use a protocol that was also used by the police service until the late 90’s when the Ranch implemented TCI. The basic idea is that the best way to successfully solve a client’s crisis is doing everything you can to prevent the crisis in the first place.

Eye opener
I was only in my TCI session for a few hours but it was a huge eye opener into how well our front line staff are trained and the patience and understanding that they must possess to do their jobs every day.