Trauma-Informed Intake Processes

Q   Gabriela in Vancouver asks: How can we be more trauma-informed in our intake process? Can we incorporate this approach in our intake forms?

​A   Alison: It's great that you're posing this important question, as our clients' experience of our practice begins with our intake process. In this digital world, folks are most often navigating our intake/health history forms online – this makes it doubly important that those fields communicate a trauma-informed approach.

One key aspect of trauma-informed care is maintaining a strengths-based focus. For manual therapists, this might feel at odds with our training, where we were traditionally taught to zero in on a client’s primary complaint. Working in a trauma-informed way asks us to broaden our lens so we can treat each client as the whole person they are.

Helpful questions on our intake form could include, "What is something that's working well for you right now?" If that seems too broad for the clients you work with, you can craft a checklist (with fields like sleep, nutrition, recreation, etc), and then ask clients to check which areas they feel are healthiest in their lives right now (at intake), and then separately indicate which areas they'd like support with. This support may or may not be within our wheelhouse, but their responses can guide us on when a referral might be well received.
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We can also include a field asking if our clients have access to culturally-safe care and support–with a follow-up field of, "If not, what would these look like for you?" In this approach, we're exploring twofold: We're inviting our clients to self-define their ideal care team, and then we're helping unpack their current barriers to accessing care. Whether or not these barriers are something we can help address, the very fact that we've opened this dialogue demonstrates that we understand that the current "system" can be quite flawed and privilege-dependent (the community someone lives in, their socioeconomic status, ability to access childcare, time off work, etc). With this question, we have the opportunity to validate our clients' experiences and help them feel seen. This sets the stage for trust-building further into our work together.