Instruments for Exploring Trauma-Informed Care

Abstract

Trauma-informed care is rising in popularity as services are recognising that traditional models are not offering a capacity for healing once thought. Service providers are becoming aware of individuals facing significant re-traumatisation using their services, and so a practical need to explore and understand approaches that accounts for these occurrences has arisen. Trauma-informed care is observed to be represented as a culture and an understanding of what this means is necessary to begin to understand trauma-informed care and its implementation. At present, there are a wide array of instruments available to evaluate the implementation and facilitation of trauma-informed care in numerous organisational services. A review of existing qualitative and quantitative instruments for exploring trauma-informed care was conducted. Many of these instruments require further validation or are limited in their construction. Foundational and substantial research on instruments were identified and discussed. Future instrument development emerging from such comparison and understanding is proposed.