Thursday 17-10-2024 - 09:48

In the second year of my BSc in Mental Health Nursing, I was lucky enough to have a placement with the Violence Reduction Network (VRN). The VRN work alongside Lancashire Police and are a team made up of serving police officers, police staff, social workers, clinical psychologists and educators. The VRN are the team who deliver “Trauma Informed Lancashire”. This is a one-day course on trauma informed practice aimed at multi professionals, and those who work with people. For this placement we were encouraged to step outside of the clinical area, see the wider determinants of health and experience nursing outside of the normal setting, and as someone is always curious and always asking questions, I jumped at this opportunity to go to the VRN.

 

Learning Beyond the Clinical Setting

What I learned on this placement opened my mind. I was surrounded by the most dynamic and inspirational team, who were dedicated to making change in our society by saturating Lancashire in trauma informed awareness and practice. I was able to spend time across services from police stations, prisons, A&E’s and schools where the wider network works tirelessly to address the systemic causes of trauma and instigate change. I was able to attend Trauma Informed Lancashire basic awareness training several times, every time I went, I learned something new. I had a million questions on how to be a trauma informed nurse, should this be included into the nursing curriculum, how can we support student nurses across all fields to be trauma informed, and can we work collaboratively with the VRN to make this happen?

 

From Trauma-Aware to Trauma-Informed

I started my nursing journey in an acute mental health ward, as a bank health care assistant before moving to work with CAMHS In The Community. I always thought of my patients as individuals, those with a story who often had to walk on a difficult path that they didn't choose, people who had been exposed to trauma at some point in their life and people who were asking for help. At that time, what I didn't realise is that I was being trauma aware, I felt aware that the person in front of me had experienced extremely traumatic and difficult times in their life and it was my job to try and bring some comfort, I didn't have the answers, but I would try my best to show kindness and compassion at that time. Some people who have experienced trauma can really struggle, I would always try my best to take a step back and look at the picture as a whole and ask myself, “what does this person need, and what can I do?”, again I was being trauma aware without really knowing it.

After my time with the VRN I was finally I was able to recognise that I had always been trauma aware but, now I had developed into someone who was trauma informed, I’d developed a deeper understanding of “the cause of the cause” - we may not always agree with someone's behaviour, but it's so important that we understand where it comes from in order to make change.

 

Bringing Trauma-Informed Practice to Edge Hill

After my placement I came back to university bursting with ideas, I spoke with Paige Rivers, who is the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Medicine President, and Daniel from the Students’ Union, and attended a faculty board meeting where I spoke about my hope to introduce trauma informed teaching to all student nurses. From that, I put together a presentation and a proposal to work with the VRN and look at how we can work towards making Edge Hill nurses trauma-informed nurses. My views on this were listened to and we looked at ways we could make this happen. At Edge Hill, we have approximately six hundred nurses qualifying each year. If each nurse goes into practice knowing and understanding trauma, the impact will be huge, and if each of them share their knowledge on trauma informed practice with three people, then eighteen hundred nurses per year will be more trauma aware, and that impact is massive.

 

Challenging the Myths Around Trauma-Informed Care

Some say that being trauma informed “is a mental health thing” and that it's not for other fields or professions - I am going to do what I have been taught throughout my degree and challenge this, as being trauma informed is a human thing, it's not field specific, it's not profession specific, it’s specific to people, because at some point in our lives we have, and will experience trauma. We may not have all the answers, but we can start with kindness. Being a nurse is such a privilege, people let us into their lives and allow us to walk beside them whilst they are at their most vulnerable. We can't always fix everything, but we can do our best to empathise and understand, helping to heal not only bodies, but hearts and minds too.

"There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in” - Desmond Tutu