Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit

Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Collaboration and Action Steps

The final step in building a trauma informed system of care is collaboration. All along the way in your journey to create a system of care, a certain amount of collaboration has been taking place. As your system of care grows, you should realize you will have a valuable resource for creating greater community resilience to reduce the effects of ACEs and help people who have experienced trauma to heal.

Benefits of Collaboration

Continuity Across Organizations Let us consider three cases that demonstrate the importance of collaboration. One is a scenario is a victim of ongoing domestic violence with children. A second scenario involves a twenty-one year old college student who has been a victim of rape. Third, is an eight year old child being molested by people who frequent the home around the drug-related activities of an addicted parent. If you made a list of all the organizational touch points that each one of these individuals would need to access, the result would be at least six to eight agencies per case. What if only two of those organizations understand trauma? The person experience additional trauma inflicted by an organization that is not using a trauma responsive approach. Since multiple agencies are likely involved working with the same individuals and families, we need to consider having trauma informed multidisciplinary teams as best practice. By collaboration among your system of care partners, you can achieve continuity in trauma informed care across organizations. Trauma responsive programs understand the physical, emotional, and cognitive effects of trauma on an individual so they are better equipped to respond appropriately. They also have learned that problem behaviors can really be telling a story of experienced abuse.

55