Building a Safe Workplace and Community
Providing Trauma Support to Your Workforce Following an Incident or Threat of Violence
In 2021, the American Hospital Association’s Hospitals Against Violence (HAV) Advisory Group developed the Building a Safe Workplace and Community framework to guide health care leaders in their efforts to prevent and mitigate violence. The framework focuses on four pillars necessary for implementing a comprehensive violence mitigation strategy: culture of safety, violence intervention, trauma support and risk mitigation. For each domain, the advisory group develops an issue brief to examine that area of focus.
This issue brief examines trauma support for hospital and health system team members. It was developed from discussions the HAV Advisory Group had with the Medical University of South Carolina’s National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center (NMVVRC) team about the challenges and opportunities to provide trauma support to health care workers following an incident or threat of violence.