What Is Trauma-Informed Care?

Most of us have experienced some form of trauma in our lives. And on some level, the trauma that we've suffered set the course for the rest of our lives.

Stacey Quick, community health improvement coordinator, explains how trauma can impact a person’s health and how healthcare providers like Franciscan Health provide care that’s sensitive to the traumatic events that we've suffered, from childhood experiences to living through the COVID-19 pandemic.

How Does Trauma Impact A Person's Health?

“Trauma impacts a person's health across a lifespan,” Quick said. “When early trauma happens, which is known as adverse childhood experiences, experiences such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, or any sort of household dysfunction: mental illness, substance abuse, any parental figure treated violently alters development. Brain development is most impacted from these experiences, as the fight or flight complex is overactivated causing impairment in executive function development.”

“It's not only the events and situations defined as trauma that affects an individual. We must consider the role of perspective: how does the individual’s experience play a role in defining what is a traumatic occurrence, event, or situation. What are the different things going on in a person's life or a child's life that is traumatic for them? And is it a single incident? Is it something that's chronic or repeated, or is it complex where there are different types of traumas going on at the same time? These factors combined all have different health outcomes and different impacts on a person's life and their ability to thrive.”

Trauma increases a person's risk for many health disparities, such as chronic illnesses, diabetes, depression, and heart disease. But trauma does not occur from only violent or abusive experiences, Quick said.

“Trauma isn't just the trauma that we know of,” Quick said. “We don't really think about trauma in the form of poverty, discrimination, homelessness, or cyberbullying, these are all different forms of trauma.”

“The trauma that we're talking about is internal. Where it can be loss of a loved one and natural disasters. We must consider the question: How is this situation changing a person's life, affecting their perspective or impacting the environment for them to thrive and be healthy?”

What Is Trauma-Informed Care?

Trauma-informed care, in its essence, shifts the focus from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”  It provides a holistic approach to healthcare and wellness.

“We can't prevent all trauma. We can't prevent poverty or prevent job loss; we can't control the economy,” Quick said. “Along with helping a person identify how they're feeling and sitting with them in that moment, we can also think about how we build resiliency in them or the capacity to have self-regulation, so that the next time something traumatic happens, they know how to respond to it in a way that helps them move through the situation.  We can help them to understand their perspective in a different light so they can process their emotions in a healthier way.”

What Does Resiliency Look Like?

“It's easy to get intimidated by the word resiliency, because it seems like it’s complex, and we all want our children, our friends and family, the people that we serve to not go through the things that they're going through that are traumatic for them” Quick said.

Protective factors can help build resiliency.

“A lot of evidence has been collected over the years from the CDC, various research and medical agencies,” Quick said. “It comes down to a few tools can be implemented across the board, it doesn't matter if it's a child, if it's an adult, or an entire community, it's these two things. Social emotional learning: identifying emotions, communicating feelings, and establishing boundaries, and respecting others by being able to problem solve in a nonviolent way.

This can include:

• When you have a conflict or a stressful experience, how do you process emotions?
• What are the good coping skills that you have or can build?
• Do you have community support or other persons in your life who care about you and offer compassion?
  

“It has definitely been challenging as normally the positive connective people that can provide the support for people needing it, were now undergoing their own traumatic experience as the pandemic impacted everybody,” Quick said. “It didn't discriminate on whether you had a low ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) score or what your resiliency level was. What changed is that now the service providers must be meeting their own emotional needs and health concerns that increased exponentially during the pandemic. This was in all of our communities, about learning what it really feels like to be disconnected. From these experiences however, we can give empathy and sympathy in our compassionate care.

“Empathy now comes from; I know what it's like to feel isolated and to feel stuck and to be scared and to have all these things going on and feel like no one was there for you. When you can identify that, because we've all been through it now. We know what it's like to feel isolated and alone, and to feel helpless and scared because we didn't know what was going to happen. And we're able to really connect with the people around us at an emotional level.”

It's good for us as providers, but it's also good for those we serve. We can better serve from a lens of compassion of what it really means to connect with someone when they're going through a crisis or traumatic situation.

Listen Now: Trauma-Informed Care

Stacey Quick, MHA, Franciscan Health community health improvement coordinator, explains how trauma can impact a person’s health and how healthcare providers like Franciscan Health provide care that’s sensitive to the traumatic events that we've suffered, from childhood experiences to living through the COVID-19 pandemic.