Trauma-informed community mental health care

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Co-developing a programme theory and framework for evaluating trauma-informed organisational interventions in UK community mental health care: a qualitative study

• IRAS ID

  344564

• Contact name

  Natalia Lewis

• Contact email

  nat.lewis@bristol.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Bristol

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 7 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  Background: Trauma can be caused by childhood maltreatment, domestic or sexual abuse, violence, social injustice, and other events. Many patients and healthcare professionals have had multiple traumas which had negative effects on their health and behaviour. If services do not deal with the effects of trauma, they can make trauma worse for patients and staff. Services that change to using ‘trauma informed care’ can make patients' and staff experiences better. Over the past decade, many mental health organisations/services have started using trauma informed care. However, our research found limited information about effectiveness and safety of trauma-informed care, partly due to the lack of a practical evaluation plan.
  This study aims to co-develop, with patients and professionals, a map of trauma-informed care in community mental health organisations/services and build an evaluation plan around it.
  Method: We will recruit two community mental health organisations/services in southwest England that work with adults and have implemented any trauma-informed care. In each organisation/service, we will run a workshop with up to 10 patient and professionals with direct experience of providing or using trauma-informed care. We will visually map out all the trauma-informed work, the changes this work may have led to, how these changes happened, and how they can be evaluated. We will then interview 10 professionals from all staff groups and 10 adult patients per organisation/service. We will ask about their experiences of trauma-informed care and discuss the co-developed map and evaluation plan. We will analyse data from the workshops and interviews, incorporate findings in the refined map and evaluation plan, and sense-check them with workshop participants. Based on their feedback, we will finalise the map and evaluation plan.
  

• REC name

  London - Queen Square Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  24/PR/0783

• Date of REC Opinion

  30 Jul 2024

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion