Warm referrals: A trauma- and violence-informed approach to supporting clients’ engagement with community services
This is an archive of a past event.
Public health nurses and other health or social care professionals have a pivotal role in connecting families to appropriate community services. When working with clients with complex health and social needs, to optimize their access to and use of, nurses and other professionals may consider adopting a trauma- and violence-informed approach towards their referral practices. The use of warm referral processes facilitate smoother transitions for clients meeting new providers. This session will explore how warm referrals (and deferrals) can enhance client capacity to engage with other health or social services. The tenets of trauma- and violence-informed care and how their use in referral practices can help foster a trusting, therapeutic client-provider relationships and increase a client’s sense of physical and emotional safety when accessing community services will also be discussed.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Identify when and with who it would be appropriate to use a referral, deferral, or warm referral process
- Describe how to apply trauma- and violence-informed approaches to providing client referrals
- Guide a client through the referral processes, in a supportive way that increases client engagement with community resources and services.
Presenter(s)
Dr. Karen Campbell is an assistant professor at York University in the School of Nursing. Dr. Campbell has extensive clinical expertise as a public health nurse, with experience working in the Healthy Babies Healthy Children (HBHC) program, breastfeeding services, and the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program (CPNP). Her doctoral research supported an evaluation of the Nurse-Family Partnership Program in British Columbia. She is currently a researcher for iHEAL, a community health nursing program for women who have experienced intimate partner violence.
