Trauma Informed Practice: Assessing for Recovery Conference

Early bird tickets are £70 and available until 14th October

Join The Mulberry Bush & The Institute of Recovery from Childhood Trauma for this two day conference where we will be presenting four assessment models for progress towards recovery from trauma.

Over the past 20 years, ‘trauma-informed’ approaches have become increasingly popular as a means for reducing the negative impact of childhood adversities and supporting child and adult mental health outcomes. These approaches are informed by a set of principles that recognise that experiences of trauma are prevalent and can negatively impact the daily functioning of many individuals. This awareness is then assumed to help practitioners offer services that are more welcoming and less likely to inadvertently re-traumatise service users. Examples of common trauma- informed activities include trauma-awareness training, trauma screening and service redesigns aimed at addressing the impact of trauma on individuals. Trauma informed principles have also more recently begun to be adopted by schools, the police and other frontline services to improve service quality more generally.

Studies show that practitioners are often quite enthusiastic about trauma-informed principles and believe that awareness of them will substantially improve their ability to engage clients and help them. However, studies also show that there is a notable lack of consistency in how trauma-informed principles are applied in practice and their value to practitioners and clients is yet to be rigorously evaluated.

This conference will present four assessment models for assessing progress towards recovery from trauma developed by practitioners working with children who have experienced complex trauma. It will enable participants to compare and contrast the approaches and look for commonalities as well as providing an opportunity to explore each in more depth and apply the principles to their own work.

During this event – Learning objectives;

1. To learn about some of the existing assessment approaches available for assessing the efficacy of trauma informed practice aimed at promoting recovery
2. To discover the basic ingredients of Trauma Informed Practice required to promote recovery
3. To gain experience in developing a ‘theory of change’ to guide your practice delivery model
4. To gather ideas about how to build in an evaluation of your own services to be able to demonstrate that what you are doing works.