Allyship

Health care workers are facing **significant trauma** due to COVID-19 and a lack of trauma-competent resources and support in the workplace.

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The Problem

Health care workers are facing significant trauma due to COVID-19 and a lack of trauma-competent resources and support in the workplace.

The Current Landscape

Health care workers, emergency responders, and public health employees are experiencing high rates of trauma, re-traumatization, and PTSD battling on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis. On top of the ongoing opioid overdose crisis and other traumatic events which further drain our already too-small pool of qualified workers on the frontlines. Now more than ever, there is a heightened risk of compassion fatigue, burnout, and even suicide. Despite the many supports that are available, health care workers who seek mental health support risk the workplace stigmatization of being viewed as less competent or even dangerous. Health care workers deserve trauma-competent support and workplaces.

What is Trauma-Informed Care?

“Trauma-informed care understands and considers the pervasive nature of trauma and promotes environments of healing and recovery rather than practices and services that may inadvertently re-traumatize.” - http://socialwork.buffalo.edu/social-research/institutes-centers/institute-on-trauma-and-trauma-informed-care/what-is-trauma-informed-care.html

Principles of trauma-informed care include: Showing respect Providing Validation and Acknowledgement of Trauma Survivors’ Lived Experience Engendering safety Establishing trust and transparency Fostering peer support Emphasizing collaboration and empowerment Being aware of the intersectionalities of culture, socio-economic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizing experiences

What We Made

Our website serves as an empathy-mobilizing platform in service of health care workers; aiming to reduce stigma, provide resources, and offer information for employers, co-workers, and loved ones who wish to be trauma-competent supporters for health care workers.

Our Mission

Help health care workers find trauma-competent support services Decrease stigma around mental health concerns for health care workers Provide information to health care workers, leaders, and loved ones, and connect them with resources on becoming a trauma-competent ally for frontline workers.

How We Built It We made our business canvas, brainstormed our ideas, and did our UX Design/ User Journey Wireframe in Miro Whiteboard. We built a website in Wordpress. Our graphics were made using Canva. Our presentation video was made in Powtoon.

Challenges We Ran Into Finding the balance between implementing our goals and meeting our deadline was our primary challenge. About half way through the hackathon, we realized that the colours we were using, even though we had tried to be careful to not use anything jarring or medic red, were likely trauma triggers. We found out that violet was a trauma preferred colour and went about changing our overall visual of our website and resources, presentation, and graphics.

Accomplishments That We are Proud Of Teamwork. Learning new things as we went. Not losing sight of the vision, both team and project. Pushing our personal comfort zones. As a group of strangers we came together on Friday and bonded over a shared vision. Our project highlights the strengths and skills of each of our team members and we managed to have a few laughs along the way.

What We Learned We have had the benefit of working with several mentors throughout the Hackathon; Ilias, Hannah, and J who gave us guidance on our project, helped us formulate our pitch, and provided expertise in user validation. Many members of the group were introduced to Miro and Wordpress for the first time. The idea of creating a Business Canvas and developing a pitch was also a new skill for several members of the team. Creating the video in Powtoon was also a new experience.

What’s Next?

Trauma in health care will not end with the eradication of COVID-19. Trauma-competent allies have always been -and are now more than ever- critical to the ongoing health and happiness of our frontline workers; as well as the sustainability of our healthcare system at large. Allyship will expand to include peer support training, opportunities to share and evaluate resources, and foster anti-stigma initiatives to support health care workers.

Links to Our Work

Our Site! – WordPress - link

  • In addition to the Hackathon’s Slack Channel, we created our own Slack Workspace: traumainformedcare

Google Drive (Information Sharing/Organizing & User Validation) - link Google Form (User Validation) - link

Built With

  • canva
  • divi
  • goodnotes
  • miro
  • powtoon
  • surface
  • wordpress
+ 14 more
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