Today we talk with Laneita Williamson the trauma informed care manager at CareNet, who shares with us the effect of trauma on a patient, and also ways it can impact their care, and techniques for managing this potential barrier to positive outcomes. Laneita Williamson welcome to the move to value podcast.
Thank you so much I am so glad to be with you today and to talk with you.
Well we certainly are glad that you could join us. So my first question for you Laneita is what is trauma?
Sure, so if we're thinking about trauma we want to think about it as an event a series of events or a set of circumstances experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and then has a lasting adverse effect on you, as the individual, or an organization, or communities, functioning. And this could be your functioning mentally, physically, socially, emotionally, and even your spiritual well-being.
So now I want to ask you - what is trauma informed care and what are the benefits?
When we are thinking about trauma informed care we want to recognize that it is an approach. It's an approach that a program organization or system takes when they become informed about trauma and the impacts from trauma. It is the approaches taken by those that realize the widespread impact of trauma and then understands the potential paths for recovery. And then also recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma in your clients, families, staff and the others. They would integrate knowledge about trauma into the policies procedures and practices. And then of course we want to seek to actively resist retraumatization in those clients, family, staff, or each other. And in regards to the benefits of a trauma informed care approach, what it ends up doing is it allows us to listen to our patients more. We begin to practice more patience and then that creates more empathy. We learn to get along better as a team. When a patient or a client or someone does something harmful, we actually began to look at the reason why or understand what is the cause of that action instead of judging that person. We also talk about how our work actually impacts us or affects us and then when we're having that connection and that peer connection with each other, we began to develop tools that help us understand what we need in our work day in order to continue forward. We begin to have new ideas, new creations of treatment plans, you know, recognize how we're to work together as a team or you know to address system issues and just create that connectedness to each other. This all of this allows us to feel more valued and be human and to recognize it's OK to have our human feelings to take care of ourselves and then to come back reenergized and hopeful so that our resilience is increased. The trauma informed care really does have a lot of benefits.
Well can you share an example or two from your own experience of how trauma informed care has been used to improve a patient outcome?
So there's so many examples we can use when working with patients in a hospital system where trauma informed care actually impacts that patient in such a way that it creates a better outcome. And I have so many stories, but it can be something as simple as you as a clinician or provider identify that it's not necessary to get a lab draw in the middle of the night. And the reason for that is that when we are going into a person's private space which is there you know hospital bed, their hospital room, to wake them up, then that can actually trigger them and they will want to leave the hospital. They may go back into a time where that being awakened during the middle of the night was something that was a trauma. So as we begin to think through how we work with our patients we've recognized something as simple as lab draws, we do it...
