Search results

Practitioners, organisations and policy makers in health and social care settings are increasingly recognising the need for trauma-informed approaches in organisational settings, with morbidity and financial burdens a growing concern over the past few years. Servant leadership has a unique focus on emotional healing, service to others as the first priority, in addition to the growth, well-being and personal and professional development of key stakeholders. This paper aims to discuss Trauma Informed Servant Leadership (TISL).

A targeted review of the servant leadership and trauma-informed care literature was conducted. Relevant studies, including systematic review and meta-analysis, were sourced, with the resulting interpretation informing the conceptual model.

Although there are general guidelines regarding how to go about instituting trauma-informed approaches, with calls for organisational leadership to adapt the often cited six trauma-informed principles, to date there has not been a leadership approach elucidated which takes as its starting point and core feature to be trauma informed. At the same time, there is a paucity of research elucidating trauma outcomes for service users or employees in the literature when a trauma-informed approach is used. However, there is a large body of evidence indicating that servant leadership has many of the outcomes at the employee level that trauma-informed approaches are attempting to attain. Thus, the author builds on a previous conceptual paper in which a model of servant leadership and servant leadership supervision are proposed to mitigate against compassion fatigue and secondary trauma in the health and social care sector. The author extends that research to this paper by recasting servant leadership as a trauma-informed model of leadership that naturally operationalises trauma-informed principles.

A lack of primary data limits the extent to which conclusions can be drawn on the effectiveness of this conceptual model. However, the model is based on robust research across the differential components used; therefore, it can act as a framework for future empirical research designs to be studies at the organisational level. Both the servant leadership and trauma-informed literatures have been extended with the addition of this model.

TISL can complement the trauma-informed approach and may also be viable as an alternative to trauma-informed approaches. This paper offers guidelines to practitioners and organisations in health and social care on how to operationalise important trauma-informed principles through leadership.

This conceptual model may help reduce the burden of trauma and re-traumatisation encountered by practitioners and service users in health and social care settings, impacting on morbidity.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is a novel approach, the first of its kind.

School violence can cause or exacerbate individual and collective trauma. Trauma-informed school approaches offer schools and educators guidance for how to respond. In this chapter, we provide an overview of trauma-informed school approaches and their contributions to healing individual and collective trauma. We begin this chapter by addressing the complex intersection of disability and trauma, and the unique implications of school-based violence for students with disabilities and their teachers. We then define trauma-informed care, describe current short- and long-term trauma-informed school approaches, and explain the aims of these approaches at individual and collective levels. Next, we locate trauma-informed responses to school violence in a context of systemic trauma and share considerations for disrupting the systemic conditions that perpetuate trauma and school violence. We discuss critiques of the trauma-informed care movement and conclude with recommendations for scholars pursuing research in this area.

By older adulthood, the majority of individuals will have experienced at least one traumatic event. Trauma-informed care (TIC) is proposed to improve effectivity of health-care provision and to reduce likelihood of services causing retraumatisation. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of staff training in TIC in older adult services.

TIC training was delivered across eight Older Adult Community Mental Health Teams in the same UK organisation. Questionnaires were administered before and after training: a psychometrically robust measure, the Attitudes Related to Trauma-Informed Care, was used to assess TIC-related attitudes, and a service-developed scale was used to measure changes in TIC competence. Data was analysed using linear mixed effects modelling (LMM). Qualitative data regarding the impact of training was gathered one month after training through a free-text questionnaire.

There were 45 participants, all of whom were white British. LMM on pre- and post-data revealed that staff training significantly increased competencies across all measured TIC domains. Overall, staff attitudes were also significantly more trauma-informed after training. Qualitatively, staff identified time as the only additional resource required to deliver the skills and knowledge gained from training.

Training was found to be effective in increasing TIC-related skills and attitudes. Organisations aiming to become trauma-informed should consider staff training as one aspect of a wider development plan.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to examine TIC training for staff working in Older Adults Mental Health Services. Recommendations for services aiming to develop a trauma-informed culture have been provided.

The goal of this review is to conduct an exploratory literature review on trauma-informed approaches in libraries to understand how librarians are discussing trauma-informed approaches and their integration into professional practice.

The author reviewed materials indexed in selected EBSCOHost databases. Included materials from selected EBSCOHost databases were available to the author in full text, in the English language and about trauma-informed approaches in libraries. Items were excluded from this review if they were a review of another work, a thesis or dissertation, or letters to or from the editor.

Twenty-five publications were included in this analysis. Publications included described approaches in school libraries, academic libraries and public libraries. Key topics are racial trauma-informed practices, trauma-informed teaching, resisting re-traumatization, social work and the effects of workplace trauma on the library workforce.

Trauma-informed approaches are gaining popularity in a variety of disciplines as the world copes with the turbulent events of recent years. The practical implications of this review are to explore the emergence of trauma-informed approaches in libraries to understand the current publishing landscape on this topic.

While librarians are writing about this approach and some are incorporating it into their practice, an analysis in the form of an exploratory literature review to summarize this work has not been done. Understanding how libraries are incorporating this trauma-awareness and trauma-informed principles into the work is crucial for identifying the future approach to library services.

This paper aims to highlight emerging research relating to the need to recognise and address trauma in mental health service users.

The author searched for papers on trauma-informed care, published in the past two years.

One paper reports ideas of service users and family members for trauma-informed mental health services. A second paper describes an online survey seeking agreement between staff and service users of early intervention services for psychosis about practices of trauma-informed care. Both papers feature themes about safety and staff having training and support for asking about and responding to trauma. A third paper reports on specific therapies for trauma with people who experience psychosis. It found some evidence for talking therapies but noted that people with a psychosis diagnosis are rarely offered such therapies.

These papers highlight an emerging consensus about essential components of trauma-informed care and the need for staff training and support to realise it. The exclusion of people with a psychosis diagnosis from specific trauma therapies might begin to be addressed if services were more able to recognise trauma. There is some evidence that talking therapies for childhood trauma can be helpful for people who have a psychosis diagnosis. However, evidence reviews should be broadened to include a range of distressing experiences recognised to follow childhood trauma irrespective of whether the person has a psychosis diagnosis.

Rwanda established a deinstitutionalization program to end institutional care and transition to family-based care for children. Part of their program involved training local volunteers in an evidence-based, trauma-informed caregiving model, Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), to provide education, support and TBRI training to caregivers who reunited or adopted children from institutional care in Rwanda. This study aims to describe the process of disseminating a trauma-informed intervention, TBRI, as part of the national deinstitutionalization program in Rwanda.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten lay social workers about Rwanda’s care reform and their experience using TBRI. A phenomenological approach was used to qualitatively analyze the interviews.

Analysis revealed five themes centered on the usefulness and universality of TBRI, the power of community in meeting the needs of children and youth and the importance of connection in supporting children who have experienced institutional care.

A global call to end institutional care and shift to family-based care for children has organizations, governments and experts seeking pathways to implement care reform. Although care reform is a complex process, Rwanda created and implemented a deinstitutionalization program focused on spreading the message of care reform and providing sustainable support for caregivers and families.

Recent years have seen significant policy and practice interest in how to best respond to the impact of childhood maltreatment and adversity on young people’s contact with youth justice systems. In Australia, this has resulted in increasing pressure to implement trauma-informed practice, although this is a term that has different meanings for different stakeholders, and little is known about the perspectives of justice-involved young people. This paper aims to review what is currently known about co-production in youth justice and discuss ways in which young people can be meaningfully involved in the development of trauma-informed practice frameworks.

A narrative approach is used to present a contextual overview of youth justice in Australia, introduce key concepts underpinning trauma-informed practice and consider the barriers and facilitators of co-production and participatory approaches to the development and implementation of trauma-informed practice.

Youth justice in Australia is widely viewed as in urgent need of reform, with broad interest in developing more trauma-informed practice in these systems. Co-production and participatory approaches are fundamental to the reform process and can help to ensure that the views and aspirations of the children for whom these systems are responsible are embedded in efforts to implement trauma-informed practice.

This paper presents an argument for implementing trauma-informed practice in Australian youth justice that is based on consultation and collaboration with young people. It does not present evidence about the potential effectiveness of such an approach.

This paper has direct implications for youth justice practice, in terms of both service philosophy, design and delivery.

The work discussed in this paper offers possibilities for new and different ways of responding to youth crime and maintaining community safety.

Whilst the need to re-imagine youth justice is widely recognised, there are few resources available to support efforts to co-produce trauma-informed practice. This paper synthesises what is known about these approaches and offers some suggestions and possible ways forward.

Mental health services have changed significantly in the past few decades. Currently, our services are transforming from one that was biomedically led to one that encompasses a recovery orientation. Additionally, a new field of study as it related to mental health care is emerging that of trauma-informed care. In this chapter, we explore briefly what we mean by the terms trauma and trauma-informed care. This is followed by a critical examination of how co-production and servant leadership can work together to support individuals through their trauma towards recovery and well-being. From which, we suggest that peer support workers are suitable candidates to co-produce trauma-informed services as they embody the connecting principles of choice and empowerment needed for all three concepts to converge and work together to enhance recovery and well-being. While I focus on using co-production in the mental health space in this chapter, the principles and practices can equally apply to other health and social care services.

In this chapter, an overview of the trauma-informed approach is described. The background and context to trauma, its impact on the person, and organisational responses are considered. More specifically, I distinguish between trauma specific and non-specific organisations by defining the characteristic of each. This chapter sets the tone for the remainder of the book by introducing a conceptual model for both specific and non-specific trauma organisations. In order to do this, I outline the differential components that are deemed necessary for organisations to be trauma-responsive; in doing so, I introduce the Trauma Ecology Model to the literature, outlining its various components.

Workforce development in rural communities to address a surge in opioid addiction and overdose related hospitalizations has been an unaddressed issue in the USA. This study aims to present an integrated, trauma-informed, behavioral workforce development initiative in a midwestern rural setting in the USA.

This is a mixed method, two-phased study: the first phase tracked and analyzed two focus group conferences involving experts (n = 6) and professionals (n = 8) to develop a training protocol; the second phase provided a training (n = 101), based on the protocol to future professionals and compared competencies before and after the implementation of the training.

There is a need of a trauma integrated approach in providing interprofessional training connecting health-care workers in rural communities to address the current opioid crisis to bring about cohesion among integrated and interdisciplinary teams. Workforce building will need to implement best practices not only among medical providers but among community mental health practitioners in rural areas.

This is a unique trauma-informed workforce development initiative in a rural community. Such studies are extremely limited and almost non-existent. Further initiatives need to be taken in this field to identify unique differences within communities that may hinder implementation.