For the past 3 years, CCI has been working with healthcare organizations to deepen and strengthen their capacity to deliver trauma and resilience-informed care with pediatric patients and their caregivers. But what does trauma and resilience-informed care look like in practice and how can healthcare organizations get there?

The Resilient Beginnings Network has developed two new tools for health centers that provide pediatric primary care:

  1. An Organizational Capacity Assessment to understand strengths and opportunities for improvement.
  2. A Roadmap Template to lay out a plan for becoming a healing organization and providing trauma- and resilience-informed pediatric care.

Capacity assessment

The Center for Community Health and Evaluation and the Center for Care Innovations in collaboration with our partners for the Resilient Beginnings program developed this assessment to address what we saw as a gap in the safety net for defining practices and systems that contribute to effectively implementing trauma- and resilience-informed care in a healthcare organization.

The assessment covers four domains: organizational environment, prevention & promotion, clinical practices, and authentic community engagement. Within each domain, there are a number of factors. This assessment offers up indicators that show how these factors manifest within organizations. To give users of this assessment a sense of their overall trauma- and resilience-informed capacity, we’ve broken down these practices into four stages that range from “low/not in place” to “high/in place.”

Ideally this assessment is used by a multidisciplinary team that represents different parts and levels of the organization (e.g. senior leadership; at least one pediatric primary care provider such as a family medicine doctor, pediatrician, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner; frontline staff; behavioral health; and quality improvement). We recommend each member of the team individually completes the assessment before coming together as a group to discuss each question and collaboratively generate a score for the organization. Some of the most valuable discussions will come from disconnects or disagreements about where your organization currently is. These different perspectives also help to emphasize that providing trauma- and resilience- informed care and becoming a healing organization is a team effort and does not fall only on any individual or department.

Download Resource 

Roadmap template & examples

This assessment can be used in combination with other methods (e.g. interviews, journey mapping, observation, etc.) to understand strengths and opportunities. Insights from these methods and your assessment can be used to develop a roadmap toward providing more trauma and resilience informed care and becoming a healing organization.

After scoring your organization, you can use these indicators as a roadmap to help you get to a higher level of capacity. In Resilient Beginnings, we encouraged participating organizations to pick only 1 or 2 domains to focus on first and create a plan for what changes they would try and define measures to know if they were making progress toward their aim. Not sure how to write an aim or define measures?  There are links to tutorials embedded in the template and examples you can draw from in the sample roadmaps.

Download Resource (Roadmap Template)

Download Resource (Sample Roadmaps)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Center for Community Health and Evaluation for leading the development of the capacity assessment for the Resilient Beginnings Network. The Resilient Beginnings Network is supported by Genentech Corporate Giving.