Working with traumatised teams

Violent incidents, racial abuse, verbal abuse and sexual assault are frequent experiences for staff working in forensic settings. UK Government records reveal that in the Prison Service in England, staff experienced over 9,000 assaults on staff in 2023 and were exposed to twice that in terms of witnessing and managing prisoner-on-prisoner assaults (18,033 assaults in 2023). In forensic mental health settings, the national data is harder to come by, particularly since the disbanding of NHS Protect in 2016 meant that national data on violence towards staff stopped being centrally collected. The NHS staff survey does provide some self-reported information about forensic mental health settings, though not in enough granularity to draw from. Moreover, the true numbers of violence against staff may be higher as racial abuse, sexual abuse and verbal abuse appear under-reported in forensic settings, and the daily continuous grind of vicarious trauma is barely considered at all. This chapter considers the impact on staff of working in a trauma-rich setting in a trauma-informed manner.