Trauma-Informed Practice
Care for your people
Helping people in need is demanding work that takes an emotional toll on those involved.
People working in the social sector can become desensitised to the emotional impact of their day-to-day work. Experiencing vicarious trauma can be normalised within the workplace. It becomes second nature to be working in this environment and to be experiencing things that aren’t good practice as being normal.
Vicarious trauma can spread through organisations and teams as well as individuals.
Simon brings fresh eyes combined with a deep understanding of the social services work environment and the inherent challenges it generates for individual team members, team dynamics and leaders. He helps executives and team leaders identify whether they are sufficiently supporting their frontline workers and develops tailored solutions to address gaps in internal wellbeing and resilience practices.
Simon also helps teams to leverage the stresses they experience as opportunities for growth and learning, providing a pathway to thrive, not just survive.
Different support options, including individual and group supervision, can be customised to address the needs of your organisation.
Group Clinical Supervision
Designed to support frontline practitioners who work with traumatised or vulnerable people, regular clinical supervision acknowledges the complexity of the client group being supported and the impact on staff.
This forum gives practitioners the support of a senior clinician to help them constructively reflect on their work and individual client cases, and grow their skills and confidence in learning from their experiences. It provides teams with a ‘release valve’ for expressing and processing stress, dealing with uncertainty, and growing and refining their practice together, so they can bring fresh perspectives to their daily work.
Group Reflective Practice
As the saying goes, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Group Reflective Practice brings together the ‘village’ in the experience and expertise of your team.
This group forum provides a safe place to grow and refine practice using current client cases. Live case discussion, facilitated by an experienced clinician, helps teams formulate optimal approaches, which both sharpens practice and leads to the best outcomes for clients.
Team Incubator
Team Incubator groups support teams by providing a safe place for reflection, connection and growth. A Team Incubator is similar to group clinical supervision; however, it is designed for teams who do not work with social service clients or in social services at all.
When people work in emotionally demanding or stressful environments, they make sense of the stress by talking with others. People need to process the demands of their role. If they are not provided a forum, they will do so anywhere they can. It might be in the corridor, by the photocopier, or when out for a coffee!
To enable your team to perform well, it is best to provide a regular space for the team to talk together rather than it come out in other areas where its impact can be negative or not include all the team members to get a full picture.
Offering a regular, independently facilitated Team Incubator gives colleagues a safe space to come together to:
- Process and reflect on perceptions and decisions relating to their work
- Get perspective from their individual and collective experiences
- Gain confidence in decision-making
- Unifies the team with a shared understanding, building team cohesion.
A Team Incubator works well for a variety of teams including multidisciplinary teams who are not working on the same tasks but are still carrying a collective emotional load.
Give your team the opportunity to reflect on their work, and their way of working together, as a group.
Provide genuine therapeutic care
Trauma-informed therapeutic care heals. It brings beautiful moments between caregivers and the people they care for and it can repair the damage of prior trauma.
For work to be truly trauma-informed, it takes everyone in the organisation to be on the same page. Every staff member needs to understand what trauma is and their role in nurturing a compassionate, healing environment. This includes the practitioner interacting directly with a client, their supervisor, the receptionist on the front desk, the CEO and board and everyone in between.
Organisations that do this well have galvanised their entire workforce’s awareness and practices to purposefully act in ways that help people heal. This informs everything they do. For example, they create meetings, processes, policies and systems that are intentionally tuned to the task of healing.
Some organisations leave this just to the teams working directly with vulnerable clients, but truly trauma-informed organisations involve everyone in the organisation, and they achieve consistently better outcomes for their clients as a result.
“Everyone in the organisation has a role to play in creating a truly trauma-informed care environment. If this doesn’t happen, decisions and actions are likely to occur that undermine the healing process for clients. I have seen it happen!”
Simon Benjamin
Improve service design and systems of care
Blue Skies helps organisations working with vulnerable people to adopt more effective systems of trauma-informed therapeutic care.
Simon’s extensive experience in specialist therapeutic care settings includes roles as a residential carer, a foster carer, clinical manager, director and CEO. In particular, his experience working in the highly regarded therapeutic-care environments of The Mulberry Bush School and Lighthouse Foundation instilled deep insights into what works and how to deliver truly effective, trauma-informed care.
Services include:
- Auditing organisational care processes, policies and systems.
- Designing systems and care programs specific to your organisational needs. These can be new services or improvements and augments to existing services.
- Implementing and embedding new practices.
- Training managers and leaders.
- Training frontline staff.
- Building an evaluation program.
“The training provided by Simon helped me to better understand myself
so that I could better understand others.”
Participant, Trauma-informed practice training
Equip your people
Blue Skies’ training workshops reach to the heart of providing trauma-informed care. They are designed to deliver practical insights and learnings that participants can immediately apply in their roles.
The training is informed by research, real-life case studies that bring the lessons to life, and Simon’s wealth of personal experience working in organisations caring for children, youth and adults with highly complex needs. He uses a broad range of materials, including videos and practical exercises to reinforce participants’ knowledge and understanding.
Flexible delivery options ensure the training suits the needs of participants and the organisation. For example, all full-day training sessions include a follow-up session to assist with embedding the learnings into everyday practice.
All too often, I hear stories of poor care being provided simply because the staff do not have the training or awareness that can make such a difference.”
Simon Benjamin
Training modules
Blue Skies has a range of training modules that cater for the specific training needs of individuals, teams or organisations. They are designed to meet you where you are and grow your capability and practice.
Training topics
Here is a sample of the training areas below. These topics can be varied and tailored to suit your specific needs.
- Understanding trauma
- Trauma, the brain & physiology
- Long-term impacts of trauma
- Attachment
- Practice tools for everyday interactions with complex vulnerable people.
- How trauma impacts professionals
- Vicarious trauma prevention and recovery
- Embedding trauma-informed understanding into practice
At an organisational level for managers, leaders and boards, topics include:
- Trauma informed organisations
- Trauma informed organisational practices and policies
- Trauma informed management and leadership
Free follow-up service
Simon offers a free 1.5-hour group follow-up session with training participants four weeks post-training, so they can ask questions and discuss progress to deepen their learning and successfully embed the training.
“Simon’s training style gave me confidence …”
“Temcare engaged Simon Benjamin to equip our staff to better manage the multifaceted impacts of working with children, youth and families who have experienced trauma.
I was impressed with Simon’s training philosophy and his experience working with relevant clients and staff. His knowledge of the topic was extensive, and his work history was impressive.
Simon’s training style gave me confidence that my staff would receive the information they needed and in a manner that would be respectful and supportive. Feedback from staff clearly indicated that expectations for the training were met and that they felt supported in their learning.”
Neville Evans, General Manager, Temcare
“… it has changed the way I do certain parts of my job …”
“I most enjoyed the material on vicarious trauma, as I hadn’t really reflected on the specific impacts that my job has on me. I really valued the exercise where we brainstormed protective measures we could put in place at an individual and organisational level to help prevent the impacts of vicarious trauma. It has changed the way I do certain parts of my work now.”
Participant, Vicarious trauma training module
“… this was one of the best …”
“I’ve been to many trauma training sessions in the past and this was one of the best.’
Participant, Trauma-informed practice training module