Increasing Equity in Pain Management, Substance Use Disorder Treatment, and Linkages to CARE

❚ Integrate knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices ❚ Actively avoid re-traumatization

Core principles of trauma-informed care The process of becoming trauma-informed involves ongoing work towards aligning your organizational mission, culture, policies, and practices with the following core principles: ❚ “Safety: Throughout the organization, patients and staff feel physically and psychologically safe. ❚ Trustworthiness and transparency: Decisions are made with transparency, and with the goal of building and maintaining trust. ❚ Peer support: Individuals with shared lived experiences are integrated into the organization and viewed as integral to service delivery. ❚ Collaboration: Power differences — between staff and patients and among organizational staff — are leveled to support shared decision-making. ❚ Empowerment: Patient and staff strengths are recognized, built on, and validated — this includes a belief in resilience and the ability to heal from trauma. ❚ Humility and responsiveness: Biases and stereotypes (e.g., based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, geography) and historical trauma are recognized and addressed.” 7 Further reading and exploration Becoming a trauma-informed clinician and organization takes time, involves many phases of implementation, and requires engagement of organizational leadership. The resources in this section offer information, tools, training, guidelines, and interventions to support implementation of trauma-informed care. These resources can be shared with leadership and champions of trauma-informed care.

Kevonya Elzia explains how, in order to be effective, trauma informed care principles must inform care engagement at multiple levels: between clinicians and patients, across the organization, and during staff interactions with each other.

Eboni Winford describes the importance of recognizing the history of oppression and medical trauma when caring for minoritized and stigmatized populations.

Naomi Windham explains how power differentials between patient and provider play a role in trauma-informed care.

Eboni Winford, who prefers the term “trauma-responsive care,” explains the importance of having representation of the community on staff (e.g., peer specialists) in order to help build trust and create a sense of psychological and physical safety for patients.

7 Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resources Center. What is trauma informed care? Adapted from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s “ Trauma-Informed Approach .”)

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