What Matters

Trauma informed Practice

Quick guidance on Trauma informed Practice.

Trauma informed Practice

The What Matters section now includes information about trauma-informed practice. Trauma-informed practice is closely aligned with the strength-based approach of What Matters. This way of working recognises that a person’s experience of trauma may influence their engagement with services and responsiveness to our interventions. While there is no shared agreement in Camden, or more widely across the social care sector about how to define and implement trauma-informed practice, we recognise the value of arriving at our approach as a collective.

You can read Lancs-VRN-Trauma-Informed-toolkit, the national trauma training framework and SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for Trauma Informed Approaches for long guidance.

“Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are highly stressful, and potentially traumatic, events or situations that occur during childhood and/or adolescence”.

Prioritising adversity and trauma-informed care for children and young people in England.

The original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study showed a relationship between the exposure to abuse or household vulnerability in childhood and health and life outcomes in adulthood. Many areas developing trauma-informed approaches use the ACE studies to intervene early to mitigate the impact of childhood adversity.

Examples of adversity taken from the original study cite:

Physical abuse
Sexual Abuse
Emotional Abuse
Living with someone who abused drugs
Living with someone who abused alcohol
Exposure to domestic violence
Living with someone who has gone to prison
Living with someone with serious mental illness
Losing a parent through divorce, death or abandonment

For a more in-depth exploration of the impacts of Adverse Childhood Experience, we recommend these webinars presented by specialist ACEs practitioners:

Last updated: 05 April 2023