ANROWS Landscapes, Issue 10, September 2015

This paper examines the available literature on trauma-informed frameworks, models and guidelines that guide organisations to improve service provision to survivors of sexual violence with mental health problems.

It finds that while both academic and grey literature show consistent themes about the principles of trauma-informed care, there is little evaluative evidence to inform organisational and systemic change. To address the challenges in producing evaluative evidence, including the suitability of standard methodologies and the complexity of evaluating systems-level change while acknowledging the context of individual systems, the paper recommends that future research examines:
How can we ensure that trauma-informed care is meeting the needs of women who have experienced both mental health issues and sexual violence?;
How can we better integrate mental health and sexual violence service paradigms and approaches to trauma-informed care?;
How can we enact trauma-informed care in practice when dealing with women who have experienced both mental health issues and sexual violence? and;
How can we successfully implement trauma-informed care at an organisational level within complex health systems? (from the website). Record #4869