In September 2018, the Safeguarding Board Northern Ireland (SBNI) commissioned a rapid evidence assessment (REA) to facilitate and support the adoption of Trauma informed practice across health, social care, justice, education, and community and voluntary systems in NI. The REA sought, primarily, to explore the evidence pertaining to organisational change processes required to implement Trauma informed care at a whole systems level, and identify some of the complexities of implementing Trauma informed processes and associated evidence of effectiveness. A systematic search of the academic literature identified more than seventy papers reporting on evaluations of organisation wide Trauma informed implementation across a range of sectors and settings. This was supplemented by a search of on-line publications, which was used to identify Trauma informed international and UK policy and practice developments and evaluations not published in academic journals.
This paper provides an overview of the principles of Trauma informed care, describing how service user experiences of adversity and/or trauma relate to the child welfare system and outlining international and national policy and practice developments in creating more Trauma informed child welfare systems. In discussing the findings from the evidence review and wider literature, consideration is given to the extent to which there is evidence that TIC implementation has led to improved outcomes for service users across systems and settings, as well as to findings and examples from the justice specific literature. Consideration is also given to the ways in which individual initiatives have incorporated change across the key implementation domains of workforce development, Trauma informed services and organisational change, as well as the associated evidence of effectiveness.
This paper is part of a suite of papers which focus on Trauma informed care in the child welfare system, the health system, the justice system and the education system. It should be read in conjunction with ‘Developing Trauma informed practice in Northern Ireland – Key Messages’ report which provides a more detailed summary of the key review findings across multiple systems and settings.
