Understanding the stress of illness and injury is one of the many aspects of healing we need to address.
Traumatic stress reactions, left unaddressed, can have serious implications for medical treatment and health outcomes and can represent a "hidden cost" to the health care system. Traumatic stress symptoms have been associated with:
- adverse health outcomes
- poorer treatment and medication adherence
- worse functional outcomes
Even when physical recovery is proceeding, traumatic stress reactions that persist can interfere with the child’s emotional recovery.
Health care providers can make a difference:
By integrating an understanding of traumatic stress in their routine interactions with children and families (i.e., providing "trauma-informed" pediatric care), health care providers can change how children and families respond to and cope with emotional reactions to illness and injury.
Trauma-informed pediatric care also helps meet system-wide goals of:
- providing family-centered care
- improving the quality of care
- optimizing pain management
- increasing patient satisfaction.
Learn more about:
- Connections between traumatic stress reactions and health outcomes
- How implementing Trauma-Informed Pediatric Care can help to address other important goals
- Family-centered pediatric care
- Improving the quality of care
- Patient satisfaction
