Trauma informed care and the Medicaid expansion – implications and strategies for local public health systems serving new clients with behavioral health needs

Trauma Informed Care (TIC) describes a group of evidence based practices and organizational policies/procedures that offer critical support for people experiencing complex trauma. (Complex trauma can include domestic violence, poverty, incarceration, community violence and homelessness).

Most people coming for help in public systems have experienced complex trauma, including the sequelae of mental illness and substance use. Trauma Informed Care approaches will be critical to adopt in delivery systems as local public health services swell with new enrollees from Health Care Reform's Medicaid Expansion

With this in mind, Alameda County Behavioral Health Care Services designed a trauma informed care capacity building project to bring behavioral health practices (and values) into a range of health care, social service, criminal justice and other public systems serving people who experience mental illness. This trauma informed care project was designed to eventually integrate trauma informed values and practices into the culture and operations of a $661 million socioeconomically and culturally diverse public and behavioral health care system.

This proposed session will differentiate and analyze evidence-based and best-practices in Trauma Informed Care and Trauma Specific Interventions, as applied to people experiencing complex trauma presenting across programs operating in public health and social service systems. Speakers will then describe the purpose, design and outcomes of this project, explain the project's logic model (which applied participatory action research on a stratified sample of service delivery sites)and offer the audience a handout with national resources on trauma informed care research and toolkits.