Abstract
Background and objective: By adopting a trauma-informed approach to care at the organisational and clinical levels, health care systems and providers can enhance the quality of care that they deliver and improve health outcomes for individuals with a trauma history. This study aimed to explore the trauma-related knowledge, attitudes awareness, practice, competence and confidence of health service staff from three small rural health services in Victoria, Australia, and examine their self-reported capacity to respond to clients with a trauma history.Methods: Staff from each site were invited to complete a paper-based survey. The survey included demographic information and questions related to knowledge and understanding of trauma, experience of trauma-informed care and confidence engaging in, and perceived importance of, trauma-informed practices. Results: The respondents were predominately nurses. Results showed that 16% of respondents had undertaken training in trauma-informed care and 44% disagreed that they had an understanding of trauma-informed practices. There were high levels of agreement for statements related to knowledge and understanding of trauma and low levels of agreement with statements related to experience of trauma-informed care. More than 70% of respondents reported that they had little knowledge of the principals of trauma-informed care, and little experiencing with practicing trauma-informed care.Discussion and conclusions: Overall, the survey results showed that staff were trauma-aware, but supported the need for more education and training in trauma-informed practices and improved organisational approaches to support trauma-informed approaches. It is important for organisations to shift from being trauma aware to being trauma-informed, by building foundational awareness of these practices and reinforcement through continuing education.
Highlights
There is no universally accepted definition of trauma
The principal researcher attended each site in September. While it is important for all health service staff to have an 2020 and invited staff in person to complete a paper-based understanding of trauma and its impact, nurses are the high- survey and place it in a deposit box
Non-clinical staff members had lower The ubiquitous exposure to COVID-19 argues for all health levels of knowledge and awareness of trauma, possibly due systems to use a trauma-informed response as a universal to less experience with people experiencing trauma
Summary
There is no universally accepted definition of trauma. For the purposes of this study trauma is defined as a series of events or circumstances experienced by an individual that have a lasting adverse effect on mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. Care at all levels of service provision is growing, as trauma affects such a large percentage of the population, those affected 2.3 Recruitment are clients in a broad range of health service settings.[10,11] The principal researcher attended each site in September While it is important for all health service staff to have an 2020 and invited staff in person to complete a paper-based understanding of trauma and its impact, nurses are the high- survey and place it in a deposit box (there were four deposit est number of direct care providers, and are positioned to boxes located at various sites at each health service). All staff were asked if they had participated in Trauma-Informed Practice training and training in Strengthening Hospital Responses to Family Violence (with yes or no category responses)
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