In addition to our crisis response services, Riverside Trauma Center provides ongoing support for agencies, schools, and communities whose staff are regularly exposed to potentially traumatic experiences in the course of their work – whether through events that occur regularly in the workplace or through hearing the trauma stories of the people with whom they are working. Providing ongoing supportive services for staff is a valuable way for an agency to show that they understand trauma stewardship and the importance of creating an environment where self-care is prioritized at an agency level.
For agencies where there is not trauma-focused supervision, we can provide ongoing supervision or case consultation for staff either individually or as a group. Supervision is focused on ways to support staff to make their work more trauma-focused or trauma-informed for the people they serve, but also provides support for staff to depersonalize the misplaced mistrust they may often feel from clients who have experienced trauma and can assist staff in feeling more confident and effective in their work.
This regularly scheduled group provides an outlet for staff to discuss ways that their ongoing exposure to trauma in the work is impacting them across domains (emotional, relational, physical, cognitive, spiritual, and behavioral) and ways that staff can take care of themselves and each other. These groups can be held monthly or quarterly.
This ongoing consultation group works with supervisors to support them in insuring that their supervision not only facilitates trauma-informed care for clients, but also approaches supervisees with a trauma-informed lens.
We work with agencies to develop plans for how to best build in capacity to support staff and create a trauma-informed and safe and supportive work environment for the staff as well as the people served. This often includes development of a clear, opt-out protocol for responding to critical incidents.
A comprehensive, two-day training in Psychological First Aid and Post-Traumatic Stress Management (the individual and group models we use for trauma response) is followed by ongoing technical support to build capacity for a team within the agency to be able to provide on-going self-care and trauma response services to their colleagues.
Some agencies are acknowledging that the level of trauma that their staff are regularly exposed to is such that they opt for a Riverside Trauma Center clinician to be on-site on a regular basis to provide support for staff. This can vary from an hour or two per month to several hours a week.
With all of these services we recommend that a training for all staff be provided on “The Toll of Working with Trauma: Understanding Self-Care as an Ethical Imperative” near the start of services.
For private agencies, schools and companies, fee is $200/hour per responder for telephone consultations, virtual, and on-site responses, $300/hour for Coping Groups; plus $90/hour per responder for travel time (if in-person). Private, non-profit agencies may be eligible for a discount.
