^{Three hundred staff members of Buchanan County Virginia schools being trained in using trauma informed classroom approaches.}

Last week I was honored to be invited by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) to participate as a presenter for the Senator Tommy Burks Victims Academy which was held on the University of Chattanooga campus.  Aware of how Johnson City has created a trauma responsive community, I was asked by TBI to speak on creating Trauma Informed Multidisciplinary teams.  Over seventy victim's advocates from around the state were in attendance and enthusiastically responded to my presentation after hearing the benefits of creating these teams.  By understanding the universal prevalence of trauma through data provided by SAMHSA, and various states who are beginning to collect ACEs data, we have learned most frontline providers are serving trauma survivors as clients.  We recognize professionals in schools, law enforcement, advocacy programs, probation and parole, after-school programs, healthcare, and more, are likely to have trauma survivors regularly among those they provide assistance to. 

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(Becky Haas, Trauma Informed Administrator at Ballad Health presenting at the Senator Tommy Burks Victims Academy)

Consider this, if you were working at an agency and were informed that 60-70% of those you served were all hearing impaired, what kind of preparations would you and your staff make to best serve these individuals?  Would it not make sense that you have staff skilled in sign language, and use media with closed captioning?  What if 60-70% of those your organization served would be arriving by a wheelchair or motorized scooter?  You would be wise to prepare by outfitting your facilities with handicap accessible ramps and restrooms equipped in ways to comfortably meet the needs of your clients.  In the same way these advance preparations would be necessary for effective delivery of services, why should it not be best practice for organizations who encounter trauma survivors to all become trauma informed?  By simply providing ACEs and trauma informed care training you can equip staff to recognize the physical, emotional and cognitive effects of trauma.  Training will help staff understand how important it is for emotionally regulated staff to work with emotionally deregulated students or clients.  We have trained our trauma informed system of care partners in Johnson City to know when there is chaos, don't join the chaos but learn to share your calm.  Services to trauma victims likely fall short when staff don't understand the significance of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) whether as an organization you implement actual screening tools or by conversational screening.

(Johnson City Police officers being trained in Trauma Informed Policing)

In my presentation at the Victim's Academy I included a class exercise using three case studies.  I asked participants to make a list of all the agencies that would be involved in assisting trauma survivors in three scenarios. The first scenario was a domestic violence survivor with children, second was a college student who was a rape survivor and lastly an eight year old child molested by individuals frequenting the home around drug activity.  As participants made their lists, it was clear to see that each of these cases could easily have eight to ten different organizations as touch points for every  victim.  What if only two of these organizations are trained to recognize trauma and prepared with programming to address it?  As a worst case, the uninformed services could re-traumatize individuals instead of facilitate healing and resilience which are significant to recovery. 

Since 2015, we have been training every imaginable kind of professional throughout Northeast Tennessee which now has surpassed numbers over 5,000 trained.  Since coming to Ballad Health as their Trauma Informed Administrator in November of 2018, we are now extending this reach into Southwest Virginia.  It is our overall goal through training and coaching on trauma informed best practices to saturate rural Appalachia in every way we can by creating trauma informed multidisciplinary teams that will become recognized as best practice for effective service delivery to trauma survivors.  In each of our trainings we remind participants that, "you don't have to be a therapist to be therapeutic to trauma survivors."  By greater empathy and understanding among a multidisciplinary teams it is our aim to bring healing to trauma survivors and become a more resilient rural Appalachia.