What does it mean for a hospital to offer “trauma-informed care”? How about a hairdresser? Or even a paint colour consultant?

Suddenly, this term is everywhere, but it’s rarely explained.

Behind the buzzword are decades of evidence about what actually helps people who’ve struggled with experiences of trauma to move on, and what sets their recovery back.

So, who is “trauma-informed care” really for? And what does it look like in practice?

Where did the term come from?

The term “trauma-informed” emerged in the early 2000s, building on clinical research about trauma from the 1990s.

Influential psychiatrist Judith Herman found that people recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) did better when services prioritised their safety, offered choice, and supported their sense of control.

Around the same time, clinicians and traumatised people themselves began documenting a troubling pattern: health and social services were sometimes making things worse, leaving patients more distressed than when they arrived.

This is known as re-traumatisation – when a professional or service unintentionally recreates the conditions of a traumatic experience, triggering the same distress. Placing an adult who experienced childhood neglect in an isolated seclusion room, for example, can evoke the very feelings the original trauma produced.

In the late 1990s, large-scale research, such as a landmark US study, was also revealing that trauma was far more common than previously thought. Just over half of participants reported at least one traumatic event in childhood, including abuse, neglect or family violence, and these experiences were strongly linked to lasting effects on mental and physical health.

Together, this growing body of work helped name and quantify experiences that had often been invisible in health systems. The central question in health care shifted from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what happened to you?”

Everyone seems to be talking about trauma. Do we know more........

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