By Jo Fischl and Jo Prestidge
For over a decade, Homeless Link has advocated for the value of Trauma Informed Care (TIC) in positively transforming service delivery within the homelessness sector. We regularly provide training and consultancy for organisations looking to increase staff skills in trauma-informed working.
However, organisations often tell us about the challenges of moving beyond a base level of trauma awareness amongst staff towards fully embedding trauma informed principles at all levels of an organisation’s operations and practice. We’ve also heard about the challenges in bringing different groups on board with more fundamental changes, given the lack of studies evidencing the impact which this approach can have for homelessness organisations.
So, whilst we hear from our members that TIC practices bring about improvements such as reducing the likelihood of challenging incidents within services or making staff burnout less prevalent, we don’t have a comprehensive evidence base to point to for our sector specifically.
To respond to these challenges, in 2024, we launched a new framework to help organisations implement and embed the principles of trauma-informed care across their work.
Ten organisations are participating in our TIC learning programme.
Then, in early 2025, we launched our TIC Learning Programme; a national research and development programme – combining a series of community of practice sessions with an impact measurement process. Ten organisations are participating, covering local authorities, day centres, night shelters, supported housing and hostel settings. The central aims of the programme are to:
- Bring organisations at different stages of implementing TIC together to understand more about how homelessness services can fully implement the principles of TIC across their organisations
- Understand the impact of implementation of TIC approaches on homelessness organisations
- Contribute to the evidence-base on TIC implementation to support homelessness services, commissioners and policy makers
Over the course of 18 months via a series of dedicated online sessions led by our practice development team, the group are meeting to collaboratively discuss key areas of the implementation framework, review their organisations’ progress since the previous session, plan what they will focus on for the coming months and learn from the experiences of colleagues across the sector.
We are looking to understand the process of how organisations become trauma informed and what the impact of becoming trauma informed is
As the participating organisations work towards becoming more trauma informed, the Homeless Link research team is using the programme to build the evidence base. We are looking to understand the process of how organisations become trauma informed and what the impact of becoming trauma informed is – specifically in terms of the outcomes for those using homeless services as well as the staff working within them.
So, how will we achieve this? Building on the knowledge base both within and beyond the homelessness sector, we have developed an evaluation framework of intended medium- and long-term outcomes.
For service users, these range from measures of how they feel within services (e.g. feeling safe or feeling listened to) through to hard outcomes such as numbers of unplanned move-ons or police call-outs to services.
For staff, the outcomes include how they feel at work (e.g. feeling supported or trusting management), their attitudes towards and confidence in applying TIC practices, as well as hard outcomes such as staff retention and sickness levels.
To measure outcomes, we have collected baseline data via information captured by services as well as staff and service user surveys. At the end of the project, we will repeat this process so we can compare the data for the participating organisations at the start and end of their implementation activity over this period. For each organisation, we’ll be able to review any changes in their data against the areas in which they have made steps to implement trauma informed practice, to establish potential impact.
Throughout the project, we are also capturing insights and case studies from the community of practice sessions to understand participating organisations’ experiences, the challenges faced along the way and what the enabling factors were in their journeys towards becoming more trauma informed. We will be sharing the emerging evidence and learnings from the programme in future blogs.
For those wanting to further explore TIC, we regularly hold events and training courses on TIC and related topics. See the link below.
