As he sat on the exam table in a Dallas clinic, the five-year-old boy’s face was completely blank. He wouldn’t speak a word or even turn his gaze to the doctor. In more than 30 years of practicing pediatrics, Dr. Farooq Habib had never seen a child so traumatized.
The boy and his father had migrated from violence-wracked Honduras. But instead of finding security in the United States, the child was taken away from his father by immigration authorities. They put him on an airplane to New York, where he was held in a facility for several weeks. Now, the child was staying with an aunt in Dallas but seemed locked inside himself, refusing to eat, speak, play, or interact with anyone.
Los Barrios Unidos and other Texas health centers are on the vanguard of trauma-informed care, a budding movement to recognize and respond to the widespread prevalence of trauma among patients.
The Texas Association of Community Health Centers (TACHC), with up to $1 million in grant funding from Direct Relief, is working to train its member health centers in trauma-informed care. TACHC’s 73 members, with more than 400 sites across Texas, collectively provide care to 5 million patient visits per year. Community health centers typically provide primary and preventive care to medically underserved and uninsured people, the overwhelming majority of them below the poverty line.
Trauma-informed care starts with the core assumption that a patient is more likely than not to have suffered some kind of trauma. When practicing trauma-informed care, health care providers shift from asking “What is wrong with this person?” to “What has happened to this person?”
Early detection and treatment of trauma can head off a lifetime of consequences and high medical costs. A person carrying trauma faces a higher risk of substance abuse, mental health issues, heart disease, and risky sexual behaviors. The trauma often goes unrecognized by medical workers, who treat the symptoms — addiction, depression, self-harm — rather than the causes.
Read more at DirectRelief.org.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.