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Our social safety net has been seriously corroded in the past decade and social service, health care, and mental health care systems are suffering greatly under the burden of many stressors including decreased funding, managed care restrictions on care, compromised training and supervision programs, legal mandates and restrictions, and excessive paperwork. This system deterioration is further complicated by the fact that currently, in most social service and mental health settings there is a lack of a clear, consistent, comprehensive and coherent model for delivering care that takes into account the impact of exposure to violence, abuse, and other forms of traumatic experience on individuals, families, staff, and organizations. Complex, parallel process interactions occur between traumatized clients, stressed staff, pressured organizations, and hostile economic and social forces in the larger environment. As a result, our systems can inadvertently recapitulate the very experiences that have proven to be so toxic for the people we are supposed to help. Not only does this have a detrimental effect on clients, but it also frustrates and demoralizes staff and administrators, a situation that can lead to worker burnout or vicarious trauma with all its attendant problems. Ultimately, the inefficient or inadequate delivery of service and the toll this takes on workers, wastes money and resources. This vicious cycle also lends itself to a world view that the people receiving the services are the cause of the problem and that their situations are hopeless and they cannot really be helped. The Sanctuary Model ® represents a comprehensive trauma-informed method for creating or changing an organizational culture in order to more effectively provide a cohesive context within which healing from psychological and social traumatic experience can be addressed. The Sanctuary Model was originally developed in a short-term, acute inpatient psychiatric setting for adults who were traumatized as children. The Model has since been adapted by residential treatment settings for children, domestic violence shelters, group homes, outpatient settings, substance abuse programs, parenting support programs and has been used in other settings as a method of organizational change.
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