What is trauma-informed practice?
Being trauma-informed involves recognising the wide spread and pervasive nature of trauma and understanding the impact and consequences which trauma can have. It also means understanding that people may experience trauma through the lens of their gender, cultural, racial and historical backgrounds and that we need to make sense of peoples' behaviours by asking, not, 'What's wrong with you?' but 'What's happened to you and what do you need?'
Trauma-informed care and organisational practice means that we take an approach to organising our services that integrates this understanding into our work with our service users, our interactions with all our staff and colleagues and into all aspects of organisational functioning. This means having an awareness of and attempting to minimise triggers and re-traumatisation; understanding that many ‘symptoms’/ ‘behaviours’ that we may notice in the people we work with may have begun as attempts to cope and that people are doing the best they can and supporting people to identify and use own strengths and skills, rather than focusing on their difficulties,
Working in a trauma-informed way helps to improve workforce wellbeing, resilience, team cohesiveness, productivity and staff retention.
