Changes in Familiarity of Service Providers with Trauma Informed Care Over Time

Despite trauma being widespread through the U.S. population and being associated with a multitude of negative life outcomes, trauma is not systematically being detected or considered during treatment or other service administration. To minimize the risk of re-traumatization and attempt to ameliorate the effects of past trauma, trauma informed care (TIC) is being implemented. TIC is an approach that attempts to educate individuals, particularly service providers, about the impact of trauma, as well as how to most effectively provide care for an individual who has experienced trauma. When implementing TIC trainings, it is important to establish a need for the trainings by determining if service providers are already knowledgeable about TIC and do not need training, and it is important to monitor service provider’s familiarity throughout the trainings to determine if the trainings are being effective. To determine if there is a need for the trainings, an initial survey was conducted to determine how familiar service providers were with TIC. In order to assess if the TIC training is educating service providers, we assessed the familiarity of service providers with trauma informed care. In order to monitor this familiarity, a survey was e-mailed from October 2015 to October 2018 every six months to service providers who were then instructed to complete the survey and forward it to anyone they thought may be interested in completing it. In the survey, they were asked to indicate how familiar they are with TIC: not familiar, somewhat familiar, or familiar. While these surveys were being distributed, TIC trainings were being held for the organizations in which the service providers were employed. In October 2015, at the start of TIC trainings, only 44.8% of survey providers reported being familiar with TIC while 20% reported not being familiar with TIC at all (n = 105). In October 2018, after TIC training had been implemented, 93.8% of service providers reported being familiar with TIC and 0.0% reported not being familiar with TIC at all (n = 64). These results indicate that there was a need for TIC training in these organizations due to the lack of familiarity the service providers reported at the first survey, and the TIC training may be contributing to the education of service providers which may be leading to more effective care being administered