Measuring, Evaluating, and Studying the Implementation of Trauma-Informed Care
Over the past decade, and in partnership with Steve Brown and Pat Wilcox at the Traumatic Stress Institute, we have been working to develop strong psychometric tools to measure trauma-informed care (TIC), evaluate the effectiveness of TIC on patient, staff, and system-level health care outcomes, and investigate the implementation drivers of TIC in complex systems.
Measurement
One of our recent efforts includes developing the Attitudes Related to Trauma Informed Care (ARTIC) Scale. The ARTIC is the first psychometrically reliable and valid tool to measure staff attitudes about trauma-informed care.
A second ongoing project features a scoping review of measures used in trauma-informed care implementation. The scoping review evaluated TIC measures for adherence to the TIC logic model of change (i.e., evaluating outcomes across the client, staff, system, and organizational levels), application across diverse service settings and populations, adequacy of psychometric properties, and practicality for practice-based use.
Effectiveness
We use pre-post and controlled designs to evaluate the effectiveness of TIC across healthcare and service systems.
Implementation Drivers
Finally, we have partnered with a large regional mental health care provider to evaluate the implementation drivers of trauma-informed care over time, with a focus on understanding how trauma-informed care implementation addresses secondary traumatic stress and burnout in mental health care providers.
A second related project used a concurrent triangulation design strategy to align a content analysis (inclusion criteria: recent [2000-present], empirical, peer-reviewed, reporting on TIC implementation) of barriers and facilitators of TIC implementation with the domains and constructs of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation of Research.
Measurement
One of our recent efforts includes developing the Attitudes Related to Trauma Informed Care (ARTIC) Scale. The ARTIC is the first psychometrically reliable and valid tool to measure staff attitudes about trauma-informed care.
A second ongoing project features a scoping review of measures used in trauma-informed care implementation. The scoping review evaluated TIC measures for adherence to the TIC logic model of change (i.e., evaluating outcomes across the client, staff, system, and organizational levels), application across diverse service settings and populations, adequacy of psychometric properties, and practicality for practice-based use.
Effectiveness
We use pre-post and controlled designs to evaluate the effectiveness of TIC across healthcare and service systems.
Implementation Drivers
Finally, we have partnered with a large regional mental health care provider to evaluate the implementation drivers of trauma-informed care over time, with a focus on understanding how trauma-informed care implementation addresses secondary traumatic stress and burnout in mental health care providers.
A second related project used a concurrent triangulation design strategy to align a content analysis (inclusion criteria: recent [2000-present], empirical, peer-reviewed, reporting on TIC implementation) of barriers and facilitators of TIC implementation with the domains and constructs of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation of Research.