Many of you are already far down the road in offering trauma-informed services and others are thinking about how to step up. Here are some things you can do, beginning today, to make your services and systems more trauma informed:

Engage leadership at the top.
You must have top-down recognition of the importance of trauma for it to become embedded in the system.

Make trauma recovery consumer-driven. 
The voice and participation of consumer/survivors should be at the core of all activities, from service development and delivery to evaluation.

Emphasize early screening.
Make early screening for trauma, assessment of the impact of trauma, and referral for integrated trauma services common practice.

Develop your workforce. 
Create workforce orientation, training, support, competencies, and job standards related to trauma. Don’t just train clinical staff — train and educate everyone who comes into contact with consumers, from the receptionist to the maintenance staff.

Institute practice guidelines.
Centralize clinical practice guidelines for working with people with trauma histories. Develop rules, regulations, and standards to support access to evidence-based and emerging best practices in trauma treatment.

Protect against inadvertent clinical retraumatization.
Implement procedures to avoid retraumatization and reduce impacts of trauma.

Read more about implementation, leadership, creating consumer-driven services, early screening, workforce development, practice guidelines, inadvertent clinical retraumatization…