How Healthcare Providers Reconcile Bad Things Happening to Good Patients: The Role of Just World Beliefs in Attitudes toward Trauma-Informed Care

ABSTRACT

Despite prevalent trauma exposure among patients seeking health care, as well as widespread frameworks for enacting trauma-informed care, the uptake of trauma-informed practices such as trauma screening and referral among health-care providers remains relatively low. The current study sought to assess the roles of health-care providers’ personal histories of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and personal beliefs in the just-world hypothesis in understanding their attitudes toward trauma-informed care. Advanced practice graduate nursing students (N = 180; M age = 34.6 years) completed a self-reported survey assessing their personal history of ACEs, global belief in a just world, and attitudes related to trauma-informed care. Results indicated the relation between providers’ ACEs and attitudes toward trauma-informed care was fully mediated by their beliefs in a just world, such that providers reporting higher ACEs scores also report greater endorsement of attitudes consistent with trauma-informed care due to less belief in a just world. Implications for both health-care providers’ themselves and cultural shifts necessary for provision of trauma-informed health care are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma-informed healthcare
• trauma-informed attitudes
• adverse childhood experiences
• just-world belief
• health-care providers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, CS, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.