MCW’s New Trauma-informed Care Training Pioneers Holistic Approach to Patient Care

Each patient who interacts with a healthcare system has their own history of trauma that affects their experience. Healthcare as a whole has not always taken that into account when treating patients. This has led to mistrust and poor outcomes, particularly in communities that are disproportionately impacted by trauma.

A multidisciplinary group of health care professionals including psychologists, physicians, and nurses affiliated with the Comprehensive Injury Center at MCW are working to change that. With funding from the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment, they created a trauma-informed care training for providers at Froedtert Hospital. Sydney Timmer-Murillo, PhD, assistant professor in the MCW department of surgery’s division of trauma and acute care and one of the co-Investigators and facilitators of the new training, says taking a trauma-informed approach to patient care is important because it allows providers to better understand how to care for the entire person in front of them.

“A trauma-informed approach to patient care is important because when we don’t acknowledge how trauma affects somebody, we tend to pathologize the person,” Timmer-Murillo said. “Trauma can elicit a lot of different types of responses. For instance, it can make people want to avoid things. It also might make them more emotional and unable to emotionally regulate themselves.”

The new training is provided in two parts. One is online to provide learners with a foundational knowledge on basic facts about trauma, trauma in Milwaukee, and how people might exhibit signs of a history of trauma, among other topics. It also includes videos that model a team discussion of trauma-informed care, along with how a team might talk through a treatment plan in a trauma-informed way. The second is a one-hour, in-person training to allow for more dynamic group discussions around trauma-informed care. It allows health care providers to come together and discuss specific case examples in a trauma informed manner where they can use cards that cover the basic trauma-informed care principles to help guide them.

Katy Bindel, RN, BSN, nurse in Froedtert’s trauma and acute care surgery department, helped develop the video model and has participated in the training and felt that it was designed in a manner that allowed everyone to leave with their own takeaways for improving their clinical practice.

“It felt more like a sharing of information, rather than a technical training where there’s one right way to do things,” Bindel said. “It provides a good, low-demand and engaging way to help people build the skill.”

Bindel said she hopes that other nurses, and especially new nurses, who take the training find it beneficial to see that trauma-informed care is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach that requires an expectation of other care team members, like surgeons and nurse practitioners to participate.

“With nursing, you’re often the one at the bedside taking the brunt of patient emotions,” Bindel said. “Knowing you’re not alone and expected to fix everything can help new grads build resilience, and it can also address rates of burnout and turnover by incorporating an understanding of team roles to give more support.”

Timmer-Murillo and Bindel both expressed their desire for this training to transform health care into a more positive experience for patients.

“I hope there is a continued effort to refocus on truly informed consent and promoting patient autonomy to help support and encourage patient engagement during the recovery process,” Bindel said. “I hope that from a patient experience, they feel more seen, heard, and like their care is being tailored to them as a person so they feel like they can trust us.”

Timmer-Murillo agreed.

“We all know we’re just one piece of a puzzle and we can only control what we can control,” she said. “I hope we can do our part to help people navigate through really hard times while also navigating the health care system.

While the training has currently been rolled out for trauma and acute care surgery, the team hopes to expand the training to the broader Froedtert Hospital system. Timmer-Murillo said they have had numerous requests from other departments for the team to offer the current training or a version tailored specifically for certain areas of the hospital.

“My hope is that we can get a little more system-level buy-in to formalize and tailor it to all teams, so we don’t need to get individual grant funding to work with each team,” Timmer-Murillo said.

Overall, Bindel and Timmer-Murillo hope it’s easy for providers to see how they can incorporate trauma-informed care into their practice after taking the training.

“I really hope people can see it’s [trauma-informed care] a team effort and you don’t have to change much to be trauma-informed,” Timmer-Murillo said. “Opening your perspective to shifts and tweaks in your outlook towards patients and healthcare can make a tremendous difference. You can still be you and do trauma-informed care.”

To learn more about the training, contact Dr. Sydney Timmer-Murillo at stimmer@mcw.edu or visit the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment’s Moving to Healing: Developing a Trauma-Informed Care Training for a Hospital System.

For further information and resources on trauma-informed care, visit the Trauma Survivors Network website or Trauma Informed’s Trauma-Informed Care.