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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.

What is a Trauma-Informed Network?

A ‘Trauma-Informed Network’ has been described as ‘a group of interdisciplinary service professionals, community members, and organisations that support individuals receiving care’. By collaborating, these organisations can improve the consistency and quality of care offered to individuals moving between systems.

Camden and Islington's trauma-informed network is the collective effort of people with lived experience and those in roles across sectors. The network was formed in June 2021 with a shared interest to connect the disparate trauma-informed approaches across the system and create a shared language and approach.

You can learn more about the network in Our Story. 

The network members developed our common purpose, describing why they wanted to work in this way, what they hoped to achieve and how they planned to work together. Members noticed how they were all using the term ‘trauma-informed’ differently and discussed their varied definitions and ways of being. They saw that each person’s contribution represented a unique worldview, relationship to the system and an experience of trauma which shapes their beliefs around how to approach trauma as a collective. Each unique worldview is a key component part of the whole.   

The views, words and sentiments expressed through those activities entirely shaped our common purpose.

Research

Alongside the experiential learning, they wanted to understand what they should be working on as a network. They partnered with UCL to develop an actionable list of components to develop the work and chose a non-hierarchical research style to aid the democratic process of agreement.

Our research questions were:

  1. What components (theories, stakeholders, actions) are required when developing a trauma-informed network?
  2. Which components are most important to developing a trauma-informed network?
  3. What actions need to be taken to facilitate these components?

Read the UCL University analysis of the development of the trauma informed network and UCL's summary in full.

Last updated: 05 April 2023