CPI Training: Comprehensive Crisis Prevention and Intervention Certification

If you are looking for CPI Certification the two best programs are:

Crisis Consultant Group certification — $139

Crisis Prevention Institute certification — $1,849

Crisis situations can occur without warning in a variety of settings, from schools and healthcare facilities to the community and workplace. Being prepared with crisis prevention and intervention skills is essential for de-escalating tense situations, supporting those in need, and keeping everyone safe. CPI Training delivers evidence-based techniques for verbal de-escalation, prevention strategies, and physical intervention methods that equip professionals and organizations to handle crises with confidence.

What is CPI Training?

CPI stands for Crisis Prevention Institute. For over 40 years, the international training organization has provided innovative, trauma-informed crisis intervention education for healthcare workers, educators, law enforcement, and other fields. CPI’s signature Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® program focuses on safe behavior management methods to calm disruptive situations, resolve conflicts verbally, and use physical restraint only as a last resort.

CPI offers in-person courses, online training, and blended learning options to suit different needs. Participants gain certifications in topics like:

• Dementia Care Specialist
• Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Trauma-Informed Care
• Bullying Prevention
• Workplace Violence Prevention
• Verbal De-Escalation
• Physical Restraint Methods

Benefits for Individuals and Organizations

Comprehensive CPI training delivers meaningful benefits for both individuals and the organizations they serve, including:

For Individuals:

• Increased confidence responding to crises
• Enhanced communication and de-escalation skills
• Ability to apply trauma-informed crisis interventions
• Knowledge of safe physical restraint procedures
• Certifications to boost careers

For Organizations:

• Fewer incidents and injuries
• Improved ability to handle tense situations
• Increased staff confidence and retention
• A healthier, safer environment
• Meeting state and federal regulatory compliance

CPI’s courses transform the way staff approach crisis moments, empowering them with proven techniques to defuse rather than escalate disruptive behavior. Backed by data and research, the training improves outcomes across settings like healthcare facilities, schools, group homes, and law enforcement.

CPI Training Formats: In-Person, Online & Blended

CPI delivers its world-class crisis intervention courses in multiple flexible training formats:

In-Person Classes: Taught by certified CPI instructors, the immersive 2-day Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® course combines lectures, group discussions, and physical skill practice. Attendees gain hands-on experience in realistic scenarios.

Online Training: For convenience, CPI offers web-based online programs allowing self-paced learning on any device. While crisis intervention requires hands-on practice, online courses provide the knowledge foundation.

Blended Training: Combining online and in-person training maximizes flexibility and skills transfer. Learners complete the online portion first to gain core concepts, then attend a 1-day, in-person class to apply skills.

All formats align with CPI’s evidence-based Crisis Development ModelSM and integrate with existing organizational systems. CPI can also customize curriculum to address specific behavior support needs.

Course Content: Key Training Topics & Models

All CPI courses leverage the following key foundations for effectively identifying, de-escalating, and managing crisis situations in the least restrictive manner.

Verbal De-Escalation: Through roleplaying real-world scenarios, skills are built for resolving 95% of crises through early intervention and calming anxious or defensive behaviors.

Crisis Development ModelSM: CPI’s researched framework tracks how anxiety escalates to defensive, risky, and finally dangerous crisis levels when needs are unmet.

Decision-Making Matrix: Guidelines empower staff to dynamically assess risk and quickly determine the appropriate response from a range of most to least restrictive interventions.

Integrated Experience: CPI Training synthesizes communication, empathy, teamwork, and assessment skills with physical techniques as a last resort for crisis situations.

Course modalities balance personalized instruction with flexible access to crisis intervention education for today’s demanding professional landscape:

• In-person group classes facilitate rich discussions and hands-on practice.
• Online modules allow self-directed learning from any location.
• Blended courses optimize access, cost, and skill-building.

Core CPI Certification Courses

CPI offers specialized courses, from general techniques to focused topics, enabling professionals to build skills specific to their environment and population served. Two foundational certifications anchor the curricula:

Nonviolent Crisis Intervention®: The 2-day immersive course provides CPI’s holistic crisis response training via instructor-led classes, blending knowledge with physical skill development. Participants gain de-escalation, disengagement, and safe holding skills to handle a spectrum of risks confidently and safely.

Dementia Capable Care®: Employees gain specialized techniques for effectively and empathetically supporting people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, or related conditions. Verbal and physical intervention methods help stabilize challenging behavior arising from disorientation and fear.

While the above deliver broadly applicable techniques, CPI also provides targeted training surrounding issues like bullying prevention, autism support, substance abuse programs, and more. Additional examples include:

• Trauma-Informed Care
• Developmental Disabilities
• Bullying & Harassment
• Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Substance Use Disorders
• Law Enforcement CIT
• Dementia Care Specialist

Ongoing development opportunities help personnel remain responsive to arising needs in the populations and facilities they serve.

Examining CPI Training Components: Models, Physical Skills, and Certification

CPI’s multi-dimensional crisis intervention curriculum leverages proven frameworks, graduated physical techniques, and certification documentation to facilitate lasting culture change within organizations.

Practical Crisis Models

All CPI programs integrate the following evidence-based models to break down the anatomy of conflict escalation and teach strategic methods for early intervention:

• Crisis Development ModelSM: Depicts how anxiety builds to risky behavior if a person feels threatened and crisis responders do not intervene early with empathy and support.
• Decision-Making Matrix: Outlines appropriate responses across a spectrum from least restrictive verbal and nonverbal actions to most restrictive physical restraint techniques as a last resort.
• Integrated Experience: Connects interpersonal communication, self-awareness, assessment skills, and physical maneuvers into a cohesive approach for crisis situations.

The models provide a methodology for understanding, predicting, and redirecting episodes through de-escalation and safe disengagement strategies.

Graduated Physical Skills

While the primary focus is verbal de-escalation, the potential for physical intervention drives the need for CPI crisis training across education, healthcare, law enforcement, and other at-risk settings.

CPI teaches hands-on physical techniques such as releases, escorts, and restraints to safely disengage from and contain dangerous behavior. All methods follow legal guidelines and avoid pain compliance or strikes to reduce trauma. Physical skills training enables crisis response teams to protect the health and safety of everyone involved when all other interventions fail and extreme risk necessitates safe physical action.

Certification Documentation

After completing Nonviolent Crisis Intervention® or specialized courses, participants receive dated certification documentation specifying their credentials, including:

• Certification card displaying the date of training and renewal timeframe.
• Personal training profile housed in CPI’s global database as a permanent record of certifications.
• Certificate available for download to exhibit credentials to employers.

Ongoing recertification courses help staff regularly refresh perishable skills and update protocols to follow current best practices and regulations. Organizations can easily monitor active certifications and upcoming renewal deadlines across their workforce.

The Value to Healthcare Workers, Teachers & Law Enforcement

Let’s examine why healthcare staff, educators, law enforcement, and related fields prioritize CPI crisis intervention training.

Healthcare Worker Training

Healthcare teams face some of the most frequent and severe incidents of anxiety and confusion escalating to verbal and physical outbursts from patients or residents. CPI training helps hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and other facilities to:

• Protect the health and safety of patients and staff
• Meet healthcare regulations and accreditation standards
• Foster trauma-informed care that reduces use of risky restraints
• Develop skills to handle dementia, autism, substance abuse, and related behaviors
• Improve patient satisfaction through compassion and empathy

With CPI training, nurses, mental health workers, and ancillary staff gain confidence responding to crises while creating a healthier environment centered on trust and comfort.

Teacher CPI Certification

Schools are high-risk environments prone to escalating behavior from bullying, developmental disorders, trauma, and more. Teacher CPI training helps education settings to:

• Better support students with special needs
• Foster inclusive, supportive school communities
• Protect the wellbeing of students and faculty
• Meet state laws and district policies around restraint
• Reduce disciplinary incidents and recidivism

Backed by data and research, CPI equips K-12 teachers, administrators, counselors, and support staff with strategies for early intervention, culture change, and safe physical restraint methods that minimize need to involve law enforcement.

Law Enforcement CIT Programs

As frequent first responders, law enforcement officers often handle community members experiencing crises associated with mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, and other critical issues. CPI helps agencies by:

• Reducing reliance on force to resolve encounters
• Building trust through compassion and active listening
• Teaching verbal tactics tailored to crisis situations
• Ensuring reasonable use-of-force standards are met
• Having social workers collaborate with officers

Specialized CIT and mental health crisis training creates police departments that are community focused, relationship driven, and trauma responsive.

The methodologies, research, and hands-on skills training make CPI the globally trusted source for crisis prevention and intervention across fields like healthcare, education, community services, public safety, and more.

The Spectrum of Restraint Training, Philosophy & Methods

Crisis intervention training centers on two key goals: 1) effectively de-escalate verbal conflict through communication and empathy, and 2) safely disengage and contain severely escalated physical behavior only when essential.

While the primary focus is non-physical calming techniques, training for safe restraint remains necessary for staff working with at-risk populations in healthcare, education, law enforcement, and related fields. Guidelines and practices vary greatly on the appropriate use and methods for physical intervention.

Philosophy of Use

CPI bases its crisis intervention curriculum on the following principles about applying restraint strategies:

• Restraint is an absolute last resort when someone becomes a danger to themselves or others.
• Other calming attempts like verbal de-escalation are strongly preferred to restraint.
• The least amount of force needed to contain the situation is safest.
• No technique should ever restrict breathing or blood flow.
• Restraint is not treatment and should end as soon as the risk diminishes.
• The dignified care and emotional recovery from an incident are as vital as physical security.

CPI trains staff to dynamically assess risk and use the minimum response needed to maintain safety, only progressing to more restrictive interventions when lower-level efforts fail.

By centering care, empathy, and ethical practices, the goal is to reduce reliance on any level of restraint through early intervention and verbal de-escalation skills. CPI’s training instills that physically managing behavior should be an extremely rare last resort, but staff need the capability when all other options fail and extreme danger necessitates action.

Continuum of Methods

Crisis prevention and intervention training covers a continuum of physical restraint techniques in response to the level of risk present:

• Emergency verbal techniques: Talking through step-by-step directions and appeals to reason, self-interest, and dignity.
• Escorts and supporting holds: Guiding techniques that secure a person’s arm safely when minimal resistance occurs.
• Restraining holds: Methods that contain torso movement in case of resistance but still allow arm and leg mobility.
• Restraints with movement restriction: Floor or seated restraints that also limit arm/leg mobility for high resistance.

The training reinforces dynamically assessing behavior to apply only what is reasonable and necessary to safely manage the situation. The key is using supportive verbal and physical approaches as risks emerge rather than defaulting immediately to maximum restraints.

CPI’s Physical Skills Training

Physical techniques provide crisis response teams a capability to draw upon when all other efforts to peacefully resolve dangerous behavior fail. Training gives staff confidence they can keep everyone safe while avoiding harm when no other options exist.

CPI teaches simple, reproducible physical skills with a focus on care, safety, and dignity:

• Easily learned without complex maneuvers or “pain compliance”
• Emphasize avoidance of striking, choking, or restricting breathing
• Designed to minimize injury for subjects and staff
• Apply gradual steps up restriction only as needed
• Ensure ethical, legal, trauma-informed intervention

The result is crisis response teams equipped to handle tense real-world situations with sound decision making and an ability to protect health and safety as a last resort.

Debate Around Restraint Continues

Use of restraint remains controversial across settings like long-term care, hospitals, and schools. Oversight agencies, consumer advocacy groups, and legislators increasingly propose limits or bans on certain methods viewed as prone to misuse or too high risk for vulnerable populations.

But many healthcare and community services providers contend trained restraint capability remains necessary as an emergency safeguard when all other efforts to resolve extreme behavior fail. Loss of this last-resort intervention could leave staff unable to act if danger arises from medical conditions, mental health crises, disabilities, substance use, trauma, or unforeseeable triggers.

Finding the right balance weighs consumer rights, health outcomes, staff confidence, and regulatory directives. Training for crisis prevention and safe physical intervention provides part of a holistic solution but requires coupling with accountability, oversight, culture change, and alternatives to restraint whenever possible.

CPI Leads the Way with Groundbreaking Training & Advocacy

As a pioneering crisis intervention training organization, CPI helps lead dialogues around reform and partners across sectors to reduce conflict, resolve behavior positively, and ensure safety when risks emerge.

Advocacy Positions & Innovations

CPI contributes extensive research, data, and real-world expertise to national committees crafting use-of-force standards, seeking alternatives to restraint, and guiding legal/ethical practices for crisis response teams.

Notable actions include:

• Helping develop federal guidelines on allowable restraint methods.
• Creating alternatives like Sensory Rooms to meet patient needs without restraint.
• Optimizing accountability to address root causes and prevent crises.
• Implementing rigorous instructor certification and training oversight.
• Advancing trauma-informed care to improve crisis interactions.
• Customizing training for autism, dementia, youth, and related needs.
• Evolving curriculum to meet emerging challenges and regulations.

At both the policy-making level and ground floor implementation, CPI pioneers solutions for safely supporting vulnerable populations in crisis moments.

Unparalleled Experience & Standards

With over 4 decades of experience spanning 70 countries, CPI stands unmatched as the most referenced and emulated crisis intervention program globally.

Rigorous policies ensure exemplary standards across operations:

• Research-validated curriculum refined through 1 million trained.
• 150 in-house subject matter experts guide continuous improvement.
• Strict requirements for instructor certification and misconduct reporting.
• Advisory boards review courses to uphold practices and ethics.
• Real-world scenarios shaped by frontline crisis response teams.
• Universal training allowing seamless collaboration across roles.

As the established leader, CPI sets the benchmark other providers follow in bringing innovation, transparency, and trusted methodology to reliable crisis prevention and intervention.

The CPI Difference: Holistic Training Delivery for Real Results

While attempts to fully eliminate restraint persist, the need to equip staff with crisis response capability also remains in many settings. CPI balances these realities through world-class training around verbal de-escalation coupled with last-resort physical techniques.

The ability to protect the vulnerable and maintain trust relies on competency and sound judgement in difficult situations — CPI teaches the integrated skills to apply nuanced solutions. The result is both reduced crises and improved confidence to support those needing help most.

With flexible access to gold-standard curriculum and models, CPI training helps organizations and staff gain knowledge and experience for creating security, care, and hope.