Skilling Trauma-Response Networks within Rural Communities: Reducing the Aftermath from Crises through University and Community Collaboration (Staff)Project Completion: March 2007
Awarded through the University of Tasmania's 2006 Community Engagement Start Up Grants, the project goals were to:
increase resilience in rural communities in Tasmania if and when a crisis occurs;
decrease the potential for chronic repercussions that emerge from acute responses to trauma that ripple through a whole community; and
to facilitate the potential to generate better evidence-based outcomes by training community response personnel in research-practitioner methods of observation and record keeping.
A Trauma-Response Consortium for Rural Health was established between the University of Tasmania, rural community services and government bodies that were engaged in Tasmanian critical-incident interventions, including State and Regional Community Recovery Committees, with advice from trauma consultants at La Trobe University, University of Sydney, and Emergency Management Australia, which has generated extensive policy and response networks. The Consortium generated a user-friendly trauma response manual that provides an interactive decision-tree format that assisted teams to map better paths for replying to context-specific trauma in a community.
The manual and associated training materials were trialled on-site with the St Mary’s community, which has case study material from which to pilot the decision tree and where there have been on-going activities with the UDRH. Formal and informal crisis response networks, such as those on-the-ground during emergencies (ambulance, police, general practitioners, school counsellors, church members, local government); and those who pick up the community pieces following a traumatic event (interpreters, social workers, police, religious congregations, youth workers, school principals, coroner, and so on) will be identified, including longer term support networks. The material was piloted with the identified formal and informal response networks. The manual and associated training material was then put on the university website.
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