Thursday 23 November 2023
Adopting a trauma-informed approach to safeguarding adults
This week is Safeguarding Adults Week. During this week, we'll be sharing daily bulletins with you, related to the Ann Craft Trust themes.
Yesterday we looked at how secondary and vicarious trauma can impact those working with people who have previously experienced trauma. Today's theme is trauma-informed practice, and how a trauma-informed approach to safeguarding can support us in understanding the person at the centre of a safeguarding investigation, how we can best work with them, and what is important to them in terms of outcomes.
Emotional health warning
The following bulletin is going to talk about trauma and trauma-informed care. If you require support about issues raised in this bulletin, please speak to someone such as a line manager, or access support through your organisation.
What is trauma?
The term trauma can refer to a wide range of traumatic, abusive, or neglectful events or series of events (including Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and trauma in adulthood) that are experienced as being emotionally or physically harmful or life threatening. Whether an event(s) is traumatic depends not only on our individual experience of the event, but also how it negatively impacts on our emotional, social, spiritual and physical wellbeing. The effects of trauma events can impact in many ways (National Trauma Training Programme).
 Figure 1. NHS Education for Scotland (2017) 'Illustration of language use in this area', p. 20.
Psychological trauma can be understood in terms of the three Es:
- the Event
- how it is Experienced
- and its Effects
Evidence of the full impact of trauma has been emerging now for several decades, establishing beyond doubt that its effects can be wide-ranging, substantial, long-lasting and costly. Resulting from harmful experiences such as violence, neglect, war and abuse, trauma has no boundaries with regard to age, gender, socio-economic status or ethnicity, and represents an almost universal experience across the countries of the world (Scottish Government, 2021).
Trauma-informed care
Being ‘trauma-informed’ means being able to recognise when someone may be affected by trauma, collaboratively adjusting how we work to take this into account, and responding in a way that supports recovery, does no harm, and recognises and supports people's resilience. Trauma-informed care aims to increase practitioners’ awareness of how trauma can negatively impact on individuals and communities, and their ability to feel safe or develop trusting relationships with services and their staff.
It aims to improve the accessibility and quality of services by creating culturally sensitive, safe services that people trust and want to use. It seeks to prepare practitioners to work in collaboration and partnership with people, and empower them to make choices about their health and wellbeing’ (Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, 2022).
Being 'trauma-informed' is much more than a word or term. It is multi-layered and requires a whole system approach. It applies to all areas of an organisation and across the system. This includes integrating trauma-related aspects, knowledge, and concepts into things such as training, recruitment, induction, policies, procedures, mission statements, language used, having experts of experience, the environment, team meetings, supervision, reflective practice, leadership style and so much more (Treisman, 2017). Trauma-informed practice acknowledges the need to see beyond an individual’s presenting behaviours and to ask, ‘What has happened to you’ rather than ‘What is wrong with you?’.
Trauma-informed care seeks to:
- Realise the widespread impact of trauma and understand paths for recovery;
- Recognise the signs and symptoms of trauma in patients, families, and staff;
- Integrate knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; and
- Actively avoid re-traumatisation.
We have identified that a section regarding trauma-informed practice would be beneficial within the Sussex Safeguarding Adults Policy and Procedures, and as such are currently in the process of writing this section. Once this section has been added to the online document, we will highlight this to you by email, and through our bi-monthly newsletter, Pass It On...News.
We have also recently published a learning briefing and podcast about a trauma-informed approach. You can access these via our website:
If you would like more information on this topic, you can email sarah.cerioli@nhs.net, or access the following resources:
For more information on today's theme, or any of the themes from this week, visit the Ann Craft Trust website.
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