Issue 23 | June 2023

The research is clear that child and family-serving organizations such as children’s advocacy centers have an obligation to their staff to implement practices that support the workforce response to secondary traumatic stress (STS) (The Center for Child Welfare Trauma-Informed Policies, Programs, and Practices and O’Malley-Laursen, 2021). Leadership involvement in assessing the strengths and needs of their organization and deploying resources to mitigate the impact of STS is imperative. However, it is also important that children’s advocacy centers commit to implementing practices not only with children’s advocacy center (CAC) staff but with their multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) as well. Individual members of MDTs are often impacted by STS and can benefit from reflective practices as support for a trauma-informed team.

The Western Regional Children’s Advocacy Center (WRCAC) is fortunate to share a home with the Advancing California's Trauma-Informed Systems (ACTS) project. Both WRCAC and ACTS are operated by the Chadwick Center for Children and Families. ACTS focuses on implementing and sustaining trauma-informed practices within child welfare and child-serving organizations and its lessons have implications for the national CAC movement.

“We believe that addressing secondary traumatic stress is an organizational responsibility,” says Melissa Bernstein, PhD, ACTS Project Director. She adds, “the cost of STS not only impacts the well-being of individuals but the well-being of our child-serving organizations, leading to high turnover and burnout. Addressing STS is a critical step in ensuring the welfare of workers, the systems they work in, and the services provided to children and families.” According to Bernstein, secondary traumatic stress is defined as the “result of bearing witness to a traumatic event or series of events” and recognizes “exposure may result from seeing the impact of trauma on children and families or reading information about traumatic experiences.”

For example, while the MDT is not responsible for agency-level trauma-informed interviewing and hiring staff across disciplines, the MDT can implement a trauma-informed approach by including acknowledgement of the impact of STS and strategies that reduce the effects of STS during a robust on-boarding process with new team members.

WRCAC recently invited Dr. Bernstein to introduce reflective practice in an alumni forum for participants of WRCAC’s Building Resilient Teams. Those participating in the forum included MDT Facilitators and team leaders interested in building resilience within their MDTs.

The participants in the Building Resilient Teams’ alumni forum explored the comprehensive assortment of web-based resources ACTS has compiled that can be used to strengthen trauma-informed approaches by the MDT. For example, one component of the workforce development domain includes providing staff with training about trauma and its impact on children and families. ACTS has provided a staff training presentation that introduces STS and reflective supervision. In addition, ACTS has created a video training series that provides MDT members access to microlearning videos to increase knowledge and skills in essential elements of trauma-informed care, such as the impact of trauma on children, and include facilitation and discussion guides for use in continuing the conversation once the video has been viewed.

During the forum, Dr. Bernstein also introduced Reflective Practice Activity Cards and promoted them as an aid to foster the use of reflective practice among peers. An example of their use with teams would be to choose a card from the Compassion Satisfaction Activity category of the deck and use the structured prompts contained on the card to facilitate conversation during a team meeting. The prompts contained in the activity cards were well-received by participants and were assessed as useful to begin reflective conversations within their team.

WRCAC is here to support your work to mitigate the effects of STS within your organization and MDT. If you would like technical support to implement reflective practice within your MDT or would like more information on Building Resilient Teams, please reach out to Salli Kerr at skerr@rchsd.org.

The Center for Child Welfare Trauma-Informed Policies, Programs, and Practices and O’Malley-Laursen, A. (2021). Secondary traumatic stress in child welfare practice: Trauma-informed guidelines for organizations: Second edition. San Diego, CA: Chadwick Center for Children and Families. Copyright 2021 by the Chadwick Center for Children and Families, Rady Children’s Hospital, San Diego. All Rights Reserved. https://www.actsproject.com/public/uploads/ckeditor/629917f99f2f91654200313.pdf

WRCAC is supported by cooperative agreement #15PJDP-22-GK-03062-JJVO awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this product are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.