Resources on Trauma Informed Care

NEW Resources!

Key Ingredients for Trauma-Informed Care

This fact sheet describes the organizational and clinical ingredients for providers to provide trauma-informed care.
Click here

10 Key Ingredients for Trauma-Informed Care

This one-page infographic describes trauma, the impact of trauma and what providers need to do to provide trauma-informed care.
Click here

Strategies for Encouraging Staff Wellness in Trauma-Informed Organizations

Addressing patients’ traumatic experiences is key to improving care for patients, particularly those who have complex medical, behavioral health, and social needs. Though many of the strategies necessary for implementing trauma-informed care relate directly to the patient experience, one key element pertains to how an organization cares for its staff. Specifically, when working with patients with high rates of exposure to traumatic events, staff need to take time for self-care, both for their own wellness and the provider organization’s ability to provide high-quality care.

To access the issue brief, click here.

Staff Wellness Infographic

Parenting a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

Children who have experienced traumatic events need to feel safe and loved. All parents want to provide this kind of nurturing home for their children. However, when parents do not have an understanding of the effects of trauma, they may misinterpret their child’s behavior and end up feeling frustrated or resentful. Their attempts to address troubling behavior may be ineffective or, in some cases, even harmful. This fact sheet discusses the nature of trauma, its effects on children and youth, and ways to help your child. By increasing your understanding of trauma, you can help support your child’s healing, your relationship with him or her, and your family as a whole.

Click here

Key Ingredients for Successful Trauma-Informed Care Implementation

Because of the potentially long-lasting negative impact of trauma on physical and mental health, ways to address patients’ history of trauma are drawing the attention of health care policymakers and providers across the country. Patients who have experienced trauma can benefit from emerging best practices in trauma-informed care. These practices involve both organizational and clinical changes that have the potential to improve patient engagement, health outcomes, and provider and staff wellness, and decrease unnecessary utilization. This brief draws on interviews with national experts on trauma-informed care to create a framework for organizational and clinical changes that can be practically implemented across the health care sector to address trauma. It also highlights payment, policy, and educational opportunities to acknowledge trauma’s impact. The brief is a product of Advancing Trauma-Informed Care, a multi-site demonstration project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and led by the Center for Health Care Strategies.

Click here

Trauma Informed Care: Perspectives and Resources
Many resources, actions, and lessons learned from entities that have become trauma informed, are necessary to help child-serving systems and provider organizations on their journey to becoming trauma informed. The National Technical Assistance Center for Children’s Mental Health at Georgetown University and JBS International created this web-based tool to support leaders and decision makers at all levels (national, state, tribal, territorial, and local) in taking steps on their journey. This tool comprised of issue briefs, video interviews, and resource lists tells a story of implementation of trauma informed services and offers guidance and resources to help you on your implementation journey.
Click here outlinkarrow_tiny

Children and Trauma: Tips for Mental Health Professionals
This tip sheet offers information for mental health professionals regarding the prevalence of trauma, how they can help children with trauma experiences, and potential pitfalls in addressing trauma.
Click hereoutlinkarrow_tiny

Coping in Hard Times: Fact Sheet for Parents
This fact sheet will help you understand how economic difficulties may affect you and your family and help you find ways to cope—and help your family members cope—during these uncertain times.
Click herepdf

Integrating and Sustaining Trauma-Informed Care Across Diverse Service Systems
Many consumers across diverse service systems are trauma survivors, including children and youth. Children with histories of trauma are routinely served in mental health, child welfare, juvenile justice, and homeless service systems, yet their needs often go unmet because organizations and service systems are not trauma informed. Trauma-informed care is defined as a “strengths-based framework that is grounded in an understanding of and responsiveness to the impact of trauma, that emphasizes physical, psychological, and emotional safety for both providers and survivors, and that creates opportunities for survivors to rebuild a sense of control and empowerment” (Guarino, 2012; Hopper, Bassuk, & Olivet, 2010, p.82). Becoming trauma informed requires using knowledge of trauma and its impact to design and deliver services and developing a commitment across service systems to building providers’ knowledge, awareness, and skills to support recovery.
Click herepdf

SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach
The purpose of this paper is to develop a working concept of trauma and a trauma-informed approach, as well as to develop a shared understanding of these concepts that would be acceptable across systems and stakeholders. In formulating this document to guide trauma-informed care, SAMHSA integrated three significant threads of work: trauma focused research work, practice-generated knowledge about trauma interventions and the lessons articulated by survivors of traumatic experiences involved in multiple systems.
Click herepdf

Complex Trauma Facts for Caregivers
This fact sheet presents information that can help you recognize the signs and symptoms of complex trauma in your child and offers recommendations for what you can do to help your child heal.
Click herepdf

Trauma Informed Care: Opportunities for High-Need, High-Cost Medicaid Populations
This brief provides an introduction to trauma-informed care and describes how this approach can be adopted to better serve Medicaid populations, including examples from three innovative programs across the country. It also outlines the health impacts of trauma, including a portrait of a trauma survivor, and details the emerging evidence base for treating trauma. The brief draws from the experiences of organizations in the Center for Health Care Strategies’ Complex Care Innovation Lab, made possible by Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit to uncover new ways to improve care for individuals with complex medical and social needs.
Click here