Being a Trauma-Informed Service: What it means and what it takes (M)

Training workshop to explore what is means and what it takes to be a 'trauma-informed' service for leaders and managers.

WorkUP Queensland is delivered by The Healing Foundation and ANROWS to build and grow capability and capacity of the sexual violence, women's health and domestic and family violence sector over the next five years.

Being a Trauma-Informed Service: What it means and what it takes for leaders and teams

Coupled with growing understandings of the widespread and harmful impacts of trauma, there has been a growing awareness that with appropriate supports and interventions people can recover from trauma. As a consequence, there has also been greater awareness that organisations and service systems can either assist in resolving, or worsening, the impacts of trauma. Being trauma-informed has now become an important focus across a vast array of social, health and legal services and it is recognised that leadership is vital to achieving and sustaining trauma informed approaches.

This one day training program will explore what it means, and more importantly, what it takes, to become a ‘trauma-informed’ service. In particular, the training will focus on how an organisation can structurally integrate knowledge about trauma across its service system so that policies, procedures and practices are designed to actively avoid re-traumatisation of service users or being harmful for workers. The connections between twenty-first century leadership theory and trauma informed perspectives will also be explored to give guidance to those leading services and teams.

The training will be informed by contemporary research and practice accompanied by many practical tips and ideas on how organisations can work towards and sustain being trauma-informed.

Financial support to assist with travel and accommodation costs may be available for specialist domestic and family violence, sexual assault and women’s health and wellbeing staff who are registered for programmed events. Contact us at workforce@healingfoundation.org.au

Morning tea and lunch will be provided for both days.

Learning outcomes

• Understanding the origins of the trauma informed model
• Understanding the elements of the trauma informed model
• Exploring leadership capacities required to lead trauma informed service approaches
• Exploring strategies to organisationally embedding trauma informed approaches
• Application of these strategies to participant’s organisational contexts.

About the facilitators

Penny Gordon

Penny Gordon has a 37 year career as a psychologist during which time she has worked extensively across clinical and organisational fields of psychology. Penny is a highly regarded trainer and facilitator and as well as regularly presenting professional development programs has also taught across a range of graduate and post graduate university courses. Penny has specialised in supporting adults who have experienced significant trauma as either an adult or a child. This area of work includes working with members of the community to resolve their experiences of primary trauma and also assisting a broad range of professionals across legal and justice services, mental health, oncology and palliative care, domestic and family violence, homelessness and housing, child protection, family intervention and support and other first responder groups who are vulnerable to secondary traumatic stress due to their continuous exposure to other people’s trauma. Additionally, Penny has championed these organisations to be trauma informed in the delivery and design of their services. For the past 22 years Penny has worked in her own consulting business supporting organisations, teams and individuals to work effectively as possible in their fields of endeavour.