Agency Profile
Brooklawn Child and Family Services, Louisville, KY
Trauma-Informed Change Cuts Restraints and Staff Turnover
It took over two years, but the trauma-informed change process at Brooklawn Child and Family Services is now paying BIG dividends in terms of reduced restraints and staff turnover.
It was summer 2008 when we received an email from the Clinical Director of Brooklawn Child and Family Services Louisville, KY. They had heard about our work from another Louisville agency called Maryhurst who had recently adopted Risking Connection as a training model.
As is often the case, our work with Brooklawn began slowly. They sent a few people to an open RC training in Louisville. They liked what they heard. But, they needed to secure funding to bring Risking Connection to the agency. Once they did so, they had their onsite RC Basic Training in December 2008 followed by the RC Train-the-Trainer in May 2009.
Then it was time to roll out the mandated RC training for their own staff. In 2009 and 2010 they did a massive training blitz to ensure all 200?? staff received the 3-Day Basic training and learned the common trauma-informed language of RC. This took a tremendous amount of staff resources and dedication to make this happen.
In 2010, however, the huge training effort began to pay huge dividends. Internal agency statistics about restraints and staff turnover that began to roll in during 2010 revealed that:
• The average number of restraints per 100 resident days decreased by 32 percent from 2009 to 2010.
• The percent annual turnover for ALL agency staff went from 71 percent in 2008 to 61 percent in 2009 to 46 percent in 2010. This is a 35 percent decrease between 2008 and 2010.
• The percent annual turnover for DIRECT CARE staff went from 129 percent in 2008 to 93 percent in 2009 to 72 percent in 2010. This represents a 44 percent decrease between 2008 and 2010.
Data from the initial RC trainings by RC Faculty also showed that trainees beliefs favorable to trauma-informed care increased at several different time points.
• Staff beliefs favorable to trauma informed care increased significantly from Day 1 to Day 2 of the RC Basic training.
• Beliefs even increased marginally between Day 3 of the RC Basic and Day 1 of the TTT five months later despite no RC training happening in this time.
• Beliefs increase even more from Day 1 to Day 3 of the TTT.
