Experiences of abuse, neglect, domestic violence, severe bullying and community violence in childhood are very common among people who use mental health services. These often have serious and long lasting impacts on people’s mental health.
When a person decides to disclose or talk about these traumatic experiences it can help healing. However, mental health staff often lack confidence and organisational support to ask about childhood traumatic events and struggle to know how to respond to disclosures or how best to offer follow up support. 

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A research method called experience-based co-design will be used to find different ways of supporting staff to have safe conversations about childhood trauma with service users. Experience-based co-design involves:

1. Exploring experiences of service users and staff through in-depth interviewing and observations

2. Creating a short film of service users’ experiences which helps staff and service users identify key areas for improvement 

3. Staff and service users working together to explore solutions and ways to implement these

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Community Mental Health Team staff will be trained to use the intervention and we will make changes to the intervention based on feedback. 


 

Impacts:

For service users: Improved experience of disclosing ACEs; improved access to trauma treatment; improved therapeutic relationship; improved mental health outcomes. 

For staff: Improved confidence and competence to sensitively explore ACEs; improved compassion; greater job satisfaction

 

Jessica’s application for the King’s Mental Health PhD in Mental Health for Health Professionals was successful and she was awarded a prestigious doctoral clinical academic fellowship award (funded by the Wellcome Trust) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience in order to complete her research project.

 

Jessica led a team of international health researchers to conduct a qualitative systematic review exploring the experience and impact of disclosing adverse childhood experiences in mental health settings for service users and staff. The review has shown the barriers and facilitators to positive disclosure experiences and the impacts of disclosure conversations on service users and staff. This has generated a conceptual model of the disclosure process which will underpin the intervention development.

 

Jessica collaborated as a co-author on a scoping review into trauma informed approaches in acute and crisis care, through her placement with the Mental Health Policy Review Unit. This research has shown the different models of trauma-informed approaches that are being implemented in inpatient, acute and crisis settings and identified some of the challenges to implementation.

 

Jessica co-authored a book chapter with her primary supervisor on “Recovery focused care and safety planning” for the Mental Health Nursing Skills text book.

This is an accessible practical guide for mental health nurses of key skills and strategies they can use to deliver recovery focused care and safety planning.

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