Safe to heal

Who It's For

Leaders across Welsh and English public services, housing and the voluntary sector

Overview

This half-day programme brings together all nine modules of the topic in four stages. It opens with foundations: what happened to you rather than what is wrong with you, SAMHSA's three Es, the Welsh Adverse Childhood Experiences study and Aberfan in 1966, approached with care. It then turns to approach and scale through the four Rs, Harris and Fallot's core values and the Trauma-Informed Wales framework. Environments and organisations follow: psychologically informed environments, Wales's new homelessness law, Sandra Bloom's Sanctuary Model, and the cost of caring, from moral injury to Schwartz Rounds. Finally it addresses honesty: where trauma-informed boundaries lie, the critique of ACEs, and a capstone on the Manchester Resilience Hub after the 2017 Arena attack, Everyone In during the pandemic and the Hillsborough families' campaign for the truth.

Aims

This programme aims to develop leaders who understand how adversity shapes the way people meet public services, and who can design safer services and spaces, support the staff who carry the work and evidence trauma-informed practice honestly at organisational scale.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Explain how trauma and adversity shape behaviour and service use, reading population evidence such as the Welsh ACE study without determinism or stigma.
2. 2Assess your organisation's trauma-informed practice across environments, systems and workforce support, using Trauma-Informed Wales, the TrACE toolkit and an honest evidence framework.
3. 3Lead practical changes to rules, spaces, supervision and reflective practice that build safety for the people you serve and recovery for the staff who serve them.

What you'll develop

Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:

1. 1Apply the window of tolerance and the idea that behaviour is communication to how your service responds to people, drawing on the lessons of Aberfan.
2. 2Assess your organisation across policy, environment, HR, governance, data and commissioning, comparing individual practice with an organisational system.
3. 3Apply the idea that behaviour is communication to review how rules, venues, language and responses in your service affect people's sense of safety.
4. 4Plan how you will act before, during and after hard decisions to reduce moral injury and protect compassion satisfaction in your team.
5. 5Plan an evidence-informed response to a traumatic event at work, from psychological first aid through active monitoring and peer support to referral.
6. 6Use an honest evidence framework and the organisational self-check to judge your service's practice without overclaiming.