Trauma Informed Practice for Housing Professionals

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Understanding trauma informed practice as frontline housing professionals can help us to better understand our customers, the challenges they face and how we can build trusting and enduring relationships, thus improving our customer service overall. 

A paper by the Scottish Government found that 1 in 7 adults in Scotland identified 4 or more adverse childhood experiences, which can be an indicator that an individual is dealing with trauma. Recent studies have shown that dealing with trauma can have deep and long-lasting effects on individuals, how they view the world and interact with others. 

If a housing professional is dealing with a customer that may have experienced trauma, they may not trust the organisation or feel safe. This can in turn provoke negative reactions that staff can struggle to deal with, ultimately leading to re-traumatisation for the customer and burnout for your staff team as they struggle to manage difficult relationships. 

Trauma informed practice (TIP) is already widely used in other caring professions such as health, education and policing, and is based on 5 principles: 

    • Safety 
    • Trustworthiness 
    • Choice  
    • Collaboration  
    • Empowerment 

Incorporating TIP in your organisation can help to build and sustain relationships with customers that are otherwise difficult to reach, whilst helping staff to manage fractious interactions more effectively.

Our new training course has already helped housing organisations to make these changes on an in-house basis, with one previous delegate remarking: “Very informative course on the challenges our tenants may face in their personal circumstances to allow staff to take this into consideration when communicating. Allan has a great way of putting the training across, very respectful and knowledgeable on the challenges people can face in their lives.”

Our first open session on this topic takes place on 6th March and is available to book here.