Trauma Informed Treatment is a human service field that assumes that an individual is more likely to have experienced a trauma than not. It recognizes the presence of trauma symptoms and acknowledges the role trauma plays in the life of an individual. Basically, Trauma Informed Treatment shifts the focus to acknowledging the complete picture of a patient’s life situation. This helps professionals provide effective health care services with a healing orientation.

Trauma informed treatment makes sure that the staff does not re-traumatize or blame the patients for their efforts to manage their traumatic reactions. Instead, it embraces a message of hope that recovery is possible. Professionals try to understand what happened to their patients, so that they can engage them more effectively. They do so by;

• Realizing the widespread impact of trauma and understanding possible pathways for recovery,
• Identifying signs and symptoms of trauma in individual and families,
• Integrating the knowledge they have about trauma into policies, procedures and other regulations to ease the process for their clients,
• Consciously avoiding re-traumatizing patients by reminding them their traumatizing events.
• It is important that Trauma Informed Treatment is applied at both organizational and clinical level. This is done by incorporating core trauma informed principles such as:
• Safety: establishing emotional as well as physical safety by ensuring that the environment that the patients come in is welcoming.
• Trust: ensuring that the service staff is sensitive to people’s needs.
• Choice: providing an opportunity for choice to people.
• Collaboration: communicating a sense of “doing with” rather than “doing to”.
• Empowerment: focusing on empowering people.
• Diversify: respecting diversity in all its forms.

Becoming an organization that practices Trauma Informed Treatment will completely transform the culture of the place. There are several benefits of implementing such form of care. Let’s take a look at them.

Sense of Safety

Trauma Informed Treatment is designed to make patients feel safe, mentally and physically, in the environment they are present.  Creating a sense of safety helps patients engage with their treatment better and become more willing of sharing their experiences with the healthcare professionals.

Empowers Patients

Empowering patient is a great way to make them feel that they are in control of their treatment. In many ways, empowerment allows patients to take control of their life decisions, fulfilling another principle of trauma informed care that is patient choice.

Avoids Re-Traumatization

By adopting conscious trauma informed principles, healthcare professional are able to actively avoid re-traumatizing patients. There are many ways healthcare providers may be re-traumatizing their patients for instance, asking them again and again to tell their trauma stories or pushing them to open up when they refuse to do so.

Trauma Informed Treatment is more than just about providing the best physical treatment, it also ensures the emotional wellbeing of a person. The benefits of such comprehensive care improves the engagement and the ability of patients to connect with support services. This helps both the patients and the health care organizations.