2024 brought to an end a 19-month initiative by three Connecticut-based Arc organizations to implement systemwide change to trauma-informed care. In contrast to many organizations' approaches to trauma-informed change, The Arc of Litchfield County, CCARC, MidState Arc took to heart the maxim of Dr. Sandra Bloom, one of the grandmothers of the TIC movement:
“Trying to implement trauma-specific clinical practice without first implementing trauma-informed organizational culture is like throwing seeds on dry land.”
- Sandra Bloom, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Drexel University and Founder of Creating Presence
Using a Learning Collaborative methodology, the three organizations all implemented the Traumatic Stress Institute's Risking Connection Change Model. The model includes a formal program evaluation component where the Attitudes Related to Trauma Informed Care (ARTIC) Scale is administered to all staff involved in the initiative at three time points – at baseline, 9 months into the initiative, and at the end of the initiative. The ARTIC Scale measures staff beliefs favorable to trauma-informed care.
Promising ARTIC Results
As the graphs below show, beliefs favorable to trauma-informed care increased from baseline (orange bar) to the end of the initiative (yellow bar) at all three agencies. This was true for both the overall ARTIC Score and all seven subscales.
The graphs also show how the scores of the three agencies compare in percentile rank to the scores of a large ARTIC data set of other human service agencies. By timepoint three, the scores at all agencies improved such that they fell safely into the “Grow” range (middle section), meaning that their scores were higher than between 25 and 75 percent of scores in the data base. In fact, overall and subscales at all agencies had a percentile rank of 40 percent or higher at time point three.
The ARTIC Scale provides clients with data to hone their trauma-informed care implementation efforts. Additionally, this Arc Learning Collaborative is a great example of how agencies can work in tandem to support and augment each other's success.