Hospital-Based Behavioral Health: 7 Benefits of Trauma-Informed Care Training and System Change

Hospital-based behavioral health departments work tirelessly everyday to keep communities healthy and safe. However, many healthcare systems experience symptoms that transform healing spaces into re-traumatizing environments for patients as well as leadership, physicians, and staff. Patients with complex needs, larger system pressures, changes in leadership, and staff turnover all can evoke fear and stress, resulting in punitive and non-relational interactions. This kind of climate unwittingly replicates the abusive dynamics patients and staff may have experienced in their own lives, leading to poor outcomes.  

Attend our webinar with RWJBarnabas Health to learn how the Risking Connection Change Model made a significant difference in their behavioral health system. 

Common Symptoms Across Hospital-Based Behavioral Health Teams

Hospital-based behavioral health systems can become what Dr. Sandra Bloom calls “trauma-organized systems” with the following symptoms: 

In Leadership
Leadership teams may prioritize top-down decisions that lack transparency and ignore staff and patient needs and requests.

In Teams
A breakdown in psychological safety across an environment may lead to gossip, cliques, and cynicism, which are all direct symptoms of a culture where staff are afraid to speak directly to leaders or colleagues. 

In Policies 
New rules that are often punitive and without clear rationale or consistent application may be implemented across the behavioral health hospital system.

In the Physical Environment
While the behavioral health hospital focuses time, energy, and resources on short-term crisis management in a conflictual environment, the team neglects physical repairs to the hospital.  

In Staff
Staff may become dysregulated parallel to their patients who have experienced trauma. Vicarious trauma showing up as apathy, hopelessness, and disengagement make the behavioral health hospital vulnerable to the increased costs of high staff turnover.

In Patients
Patients enter an environment of stress instead of care, which can exacerbate symptoms, lower health outcomes, and create a revolving door. 

Trauma-informed training and culture change turns symptoms into solutions; where hospital-based behavioral health systems experience symptoms, TSI provides solutions.

Trauma-informed care interventions such as trauma training, leadership education, and attention to staff wellbeing have been linked to prevention and reduction of harm across health and human service systems in the following ways: 

Increase shared language and understanding about trauma and trauma healing across all levels of leadership and staffing
Symptom: Patients or staff report feeling unheard and disrespected
Solution: Trauma survivors’ behavior can evoke strong feelings in staff including fear, worry, anger, and shame. Frequent crises are common. A shared understanding and common language of trauma helps staff at all levels to respond with empathy to each other and patients.

Improve outcomes for patients with high trauma exposure
Symptom: Increased trauma exposure for staff and patients with their own trauma histories.
Solution: Many staff and patients have their own histories of trauma. TSI’s trauma training helps staff understand how their own trauma can get activated by patients and those they work with. They learn to notice their strong reactions to others and how those reactions can help them build healing relationships or get in the way of those relationships.

Increase staff satisfaction and retention
Symptom: High rates of absences and missed work, leading to increased turnover.
Solution: Stress induced by violent and re-traumatizing environments cause increased employee absence, placing additional strain on other team members. Staff may seek alternative employment at behavioral health hospital systems with healthier work environments, burdening the hospital with increased recruitment, hiring, and training costs. Trauma-informed care training is associated with increased staff satisfaction, engagement, and retention by creating a culture of care.

Increase connection and collaboration between leaders and staff across departments
Symptom: Frequent conflict between departments and disconnection between leadership and frontline staff.
Solution: Conflict can impede collaboration between departments as they try to resolve problems – leaders are out of touch with the challenges of direct care staff, and staff addressing critical and urgent needs on the frontlines feel disconnected from the priorities of the leadership teams. Trauma-informed care contributes to a relationship-first approach at every level of the organization, helping everyone to feel seen and heard.

Decrease use of restraint and seclusion practices
Symptom: Increased use of restraint and seclusion practices.
Solution: Outdated and ineffective methods of control and isolation are sometimes still utilized to address misbehavior in behavioral health systems. Restraint and seclusion practices often exacerbate trauma for both the staff and the patient. Trauma-informed teams learn how to respond instead of react in instances of conflict, reducing re-traumatization of all involved.

Decrease rates of staff and patient injuries
Symptom: Higher rates of staff and patient injuries.
Solution: Control tactics in response to misbehavior often lead to increasingly violent responses by the patient being contained or isolated, which can cause physical and/or psychological harm to anyone involved in the conflict. Responding to conflict with trauma-informed tools mitigates the risk of physical and psychological injury.

Decrease risk for litigation
Symptom: Increased potential for litigation.
Solution: Violent conflict between patients and staff increases the behavioral health hospitals' vulnerability to lawsuits, costing the institution time, energy, and financial resources. Reducing litigation risk through trauma-informed care practices redirect these resources back where they belong: toward committed care teams, excellent healthcare services, and necessary improvements. 

Transforming symptoms into solutions saves time, money, and resources while creating a culture of care that heals. The Risking Connection Change Model provides tailored, systems-wide, trauma-informed care solutions for healthcare systems with behavioral care components. Get to know our processes and programs better by taking the next best step for you and your team.