No Wrong Door (NWD) is an adult community mental health transformation programme across Hampshire, Southampton, Isle of Wight, and Portsmouth. The team work with organisations to make care for people needing help with their mental health simpler, smarter and more integrated.

Chris Cunnane, Lead for Inclusion’s No Wrong Door Service, shares a short insight into how they are becoming more trauma-informed, to enhance the service further.

Inclusion’s No Wrong Door Team work with individuals who have multiple vulnerabilities, the majority being as a result of trauma that is experienced currently, or was experienced in their past.

All of our practitioners work in a trauma-informed way. This means we minimise the need for multiple assessments, which could potentially re-traumatise the individual by having to revisit difficult experiences with multiple professionals. We also visit patients at home, or in a community safe space. This helps us to engage them into treatment without the challenges that are often associated with attending secondary mental health and substance use environments.

When someone accessing our service has experienced trauma in their past, we seek to engage the person in appropriate external support to deal with this, as well as creating a pathway to receive help for their mental health and substance use challenges. We support them until they are successfully engaged with these services.

There is a clear need for all No Wrong Door practitioners to work in a trauma-informed way. A practitioner from each of our teams has attended Enhanced Trauma Practitioner Training, at the invitation of the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board. Our Team Leaders are also booked in to attend Trauma Informed Training, provided by Rock Pool.

In order to help people manage the strong emotions associated with trauma, we have set up and successfully run a group programme which helps people to ‘Manage Emotions’, to which we’ve had some excellent feedback.