Trauma Informed De-escalation Founded in a public health perspective-keynote

Dr Lene Lauge Berring is head of The Centre for Relationships and De-escalation in the Mental Health Services in Region Zealand in Denmark. Dr Berring’s research is focused on prevention of violence and reduction of coercive measures. This includes de-escalation practices, practical training programs, and organizational change toward proactive and positive prevention based on a public health perspective and trauma-informed health care delivery models.
Dr Berring is a specialist in utilizing participatory research methods that involve people with lived experiences as partners. They can produce nuanced insights in violence management practices and clinical culture. Participatory research is powerful because it can raise new research questions and create new responses to these questions. It can also empower those who partake in the research.
As a former manager at mental health hospitals, she has experienced how coping with and understanding violent and threatening behaviour is a challenging, but integral part of a caregiver’s job. If not managed well, such situations can result in staff and patient injury, and they can lead to the use of harmful restrictive practices and coercive measures. Moreover, violence is a traumatic experience for all parties and can cause vicarious trauma in staff. Therefore, she has a strong interest in how mental health organisations can support the development of safe mental health hospitals as a sanctuary for people who receive psychiatric inpatient care.
In line with this, Dr Berring leads organisational training programs (‘The Relationship and De-escalation Concept’) and explores the implementation of trauma Informed de-escalation approaches and the effect on environments and staff members and patients.

Lene Lauge Berring’s keynote will include a presentation of a trauma-informed de-escalation approach founded on a public health perspective and how this perspective can change clinicians’ focus from reacting to violence to a focus on changing the social, behavioural, and environmental factors that cause violence. Moreover, she will discuss and reflect upon how sustainable de-escalation practices can be implemented in mental health care settings and how increased knowledge about de-escalation in organisations can create safe clinical settings and reduce violence and the use of coercive measures.