Understanding how trauma-informed care can be implemented in correctional facilities

Trauma-informed care is a whole-system approach that goes beyond trauma-specific services and introduces broad changes in policy and practice that can help lessen the lifelong effects of trauma in an entire patient population. People who experience incarceration are more likely to have experienced trauma than others in the general population, and the experience of incarceration can be inherently retraumatizing. Our project team, Jessica Gaber, Eilish Scallan, and Fiona Kouyoumdjian, were contracted by the Canadian federal prison system to create a report with recommendations about how correctional systems can become more trauma-informed in their health care provision.

We conducted a scoping review to understand how trauma-informed care is implemented in correctional facilities, and the evidence for its impacts. We categorized our findings into structural, organizational, and individual levels for ease of use by the correctional authority. We also organized results into the Quintuple Aim for Healthcare Improvement framework (which includes improving population health, enhancing the care experience, reducing costs, addressing clinician burnout, and advancing health equity) to keep our focus on health care. In addition to the report, we developed an academic manuscript that has recently been accepted to the Journal of Correctional Health Care, and will be published soon.