E09 – Integrated Care in the Emergency Department: Implementation of a Trauma-Focused Mental Health Provider for Sexual Assault and Other Trauma Patients

Summary

This presentation will provide a comprehensive picture of the first year and a half in to embedding a trauma-focused mental health specialist in to the care model in a Level 1 Trauma Center Emergency Department, as well as the addition of a Nurse Coordinator for the Sexual Assault medical forensic program. Both roles were added with the hope of bettering patient care in terms of providing more trauma informed approaches, increasing quantity and quality of specialized staff to assist with trauma patients, working to address and lessen health and social inequities in care, and establishing a robust team of support services and referrals across the lifespan. In turn, our goals are to decrease the likelihood or severity that trauma patients we work with will experience post-traumatic stress disorder, fail to connect to helpful follow-up services, and develop any number of chronic and long term health problems commonly associated with trauma. Additionally, these roles provide much needed support and training to interdisciplinary Emergency Department staff in the form of secondary trauma exposure, burnout, compassion satisfaction/compassion fatigue assessments, tailored outpatient therapy referrals, debriefs from cases, robust sexual assault program training, trauma informed care, and other continuing education. In our talk, we will try to cover all the bases that one would need to think about, questions that would likely arise, and detailed steps if others were considering adding a trauma-focused behavioral health role and/or a sexual assault program coordinator to their emergency department. We will cover the Why, When, Where, How, Benefits, Challenges, Lessons Learned, Patient Outcomes, & Success Stories of adding a Trauma-Focused Mental Health Specialist & SANE Coordinator to the Emergency Department team at UNC Chapel Hill. A physician and medical director of the Sexual Assault program at UNC will speak to the identified needs she saw for both trauma patients and those patients specifically presenting for a sexual assault related matter, and the vision she crafted for these two new roles to help improve the trauma program and put patient-centered care at the forefront. She will speak to all of the early steps that were involved in creating, developing, and hiring for these two roles, and the anticipated growth she hoped to see after a year. A sexual assault nurse examiner and emergency department nurse who went on to become the SANE program coordinator will speak to all of the many enhancements she has made to training, staffing, patient care, hospital billing, EMR management, coordinating with state and local agencies, and associated outcomes thus far. A licensed clinical social worker associate who is the trauma specialist will detail steps that went in to developing her role and program from the ground up, the helpful tools she utilized, and quantitative and qualitative outcomes, including patient voices sharing their experiences.