Transforming Health Care and Strengthening Results

Trauma Informed Leadership

Vital leadership Support for Recovery and Restoration

Current times and challenges call for a skill set and tools to lead health care teams on the frontline of COVID care. Creative Health Care Management has developed a program to educate and support executives and managers through this crisis by deepening their capacity to understand the impact on their own personal and professional lives.

This experiential learning provides relationship-based and trauma informed interactions and communication strategies to help you support your teams. You will learn trauma related concepts and intervention techniques to enhance your own and your teams’ Wellbeing, building a foundation for resiliency and the potential for posttraumatic growth.

Expected Outcomes

Enhanced self-care for leaders and improved staff engagement
Increased utilization of wellness resources within organizations
Diminished experience of isolation and burnout
Reduce the stigma often associated with trauma and need for mental health support.

Support your leaders and their teams. Call us to help you start the recovery process at your organization.

Cope and Heal

Trauma informed leadership is essential to help health care workers recover from the long-term effects of their traumatic experiences.

Why a Trauma Informed Approach

Trauma informed leaders understand that people (including themselves) will struggle due to current and past traumatic experiences. They recognize the importance of presence for themselves and their teams to facilitate coping and growth. Four relational practices, attuning, wondering, following, and holding, provide a mental model for intentional and consistent presence. The practices of attuning, wondering, following, and holding bring therapeutic relationships to life. Each of them describes a way of interacting with patients, and they also describe a mindset and a way of being. Attuning is “tuning in” to ourselves and others. Wondering is being truly interested to learn about the other. Following is listening acting on what we learn. Holding is creating a safe haven and to protect from harm.

Self-care is Fundamental to Supporting Others

Trauma informed leaders understand that in order to support others, they need to prioritize their own self-care. Having said that, practicing self-care has always been a challenge for many leaders. There will never be enough: time, energy, staff, or resources, but leaders need time for reflection and slowing down to connect to their own needs. The goal is to connect with oneself which allows you to connect with others more fully. Self-care may take the form of a regular meditation practice, practicing self-compassion, exercise, journaling, attending an ongoing peer support group. If you need a push to get your self-care started do it because you should be modeling self-care for your team.

Peer Support for Leaders

Peer support is a highly effective way to provide support for leaders. Leaders often feel alone in their organization and peer support is known to create much needed connection, and provide validation, normalization, and hope. Participants who have participated in facilitated Trauma Informed Leadership sessions reported they found their time together supportive, helped them cope, and also helped them lead with greater ease through difficult times. “I and many of my colleagues feel depleted and we have found strength in supporting each other in these sessions.”

There’s Hope: Posttraumatic Growth

Post traumatic growth is a positive change experienced because of the struggle with a major life crisis or a traumatic event. Trauma Informed leaders cultivate the conditions for Posttraumatic Growth through compassionate presence, understanding of trauma responses, and their ability to provide their teams with the experience of being seen and valued in times of distress. Resilience is important and very useful in overcoming adversity; but Posttraumatic Growth creates irrevocable change. With Posttraumatic Growth the traumatic experience is no less traumatic or painful. But, with that pain, we can, at the same time experience greater meaning and purpose in our lives and work not in spite of, but BECAUSE of the traumatic event.

Tuning in to Yourself is the Foundation of Wellbeing

November 3, 2017

While many useful assessment tools exist to help you determine your current Wellbeing profile, we’d like to invite you to first apply the tool of your own ability to attune to yourself.

MAGNET®, Magnet Recognition Program®, ANCC Magnet Recognition®, Journey to Magnet Excellence®, Pathway to Excellence® Program, Pathway to Excellence in Long Term Care®, Demographic Data Collection Tool®, DDCT®, Practice Transition Accreditation Program® (PTAP) are registered trademarks of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). The products and services of Creative Health Care Management are neither sponsored nor endorsed by ANCC. All rights reserved. The content presented in here is the expressed opinion of the author/presenter and not that of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC).

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