Perinatal trauma-informed care isn’t just about individualized care room-by-room. This type of care inspires system change. Early in Jamie Howeth’s career as a labor nurse, she watched a patient crawl away from a resident during a cervical exam. She felt like she couldn’t say anything. She carried that moment for years.
That experience planted something in her. She felt the need to understand trauma, to name what she had witnessed, and to figure out how to do something about it. Therapy helped her process it. The Trauma-Informed Birth Nurse Program gave her the framework and the language to act on it.
After completing the Trauma-Informed Birth Nurse Program, Jamie did not return to her unit and simply practice differently at the bedside. She returned and built something influential. Within months, she had formed a committee, recruited six nurses across labor, postpartum, antepartum, and clinic settings, organized OB physicians and a clinical psychologist across two campuses, and launched a year-long perinatal trauma-informed care education initiative at the University of Washington Medical Center.
This is what it looks like when nurse-led trauma-informed care training takes root in a hospital system.
The starting point
Jamie’s committee set four goals from the beginning: staff education for all patient-facing roles, ACE screening in outpatient settings, postpartum debriefs after every delivery regardless of outcome, and lasting support structures for staff experiencing secondary trauma.
They used The Birth Nurse’s postpartum debrief guide as their clinical foundation for the final phase of the initiative, giving nurses a structured, actionable tool for helping families begin to process their birth experience.
What the program looked like
Over the course of one year, the Perinatal TIC Committee delivered four education sessions via Zoom. Each session ran one hour, with a recorded didactic portion and a live discussion group. Content was offered in the morning and afternoon to reach staff across shifts. Every patient-facing role was included: CNMs, MDs, RNs, MSWs, care techs, medical assistants, and front desk staff.
89 staff attended the first session alone, with additional views of the recorded content.
Each session opened with grounding exercises, a direct reflection of the TIBN program’s approach to holding space for ourselves before clinical content.
The four sessions covered:
An introduction to trauma-informed care. A deeper dive into TIC for laboring and postpartum patients specifically. Vicarious trauma and staff self-care. And a special populations session featuring community voices, including a Black doula discussing the impact of racism on birth experiences and a doula with lived experience of substance use and birth.
That final session was Jamie pushing hard to bring first-person stories into the room. It was directly shaped by how the TIBN program uses those stories to make the learning real and center patients in the learning.
Why this matters for hospitals
Perinatal trauma-informed care is not a soft initiative. It is a patient safety framework. Research shows that up to 45 percent of birthing people experience trauma during their birth process, and 39 percent of female-identifying people in the US report exposure to multiple adverse childhood experiences before age 18. The nurses and providers in your building are caring for those patients every single shift.
The nurses and providers are also community members, part of those statistics.
When staff lack a trauma-informed framework, they do not just miss opportunities for healing. They risk causing harm. And when nurses carry the weight of that harm without support, secondary traumatic stress follows, contributing to burnout, attrition, clinical errors, and workforce instability.
Jamie’s initiative addressed both sides of that equation at once: patient care and nurse support.
For hospitals pursuing or maintaining Magnet designation, this work hits directly on the framework’s core pillars. Shared governance, nurse-led quality improvement, a culture of inquiry, and a harm-free environment are not checkboxes. They are the standard Magnet recognition is built on. Jamie’s committee is a textbook example of each one. She identified a gap, built a team, implemented an evidence-based initiative, measured it, and took it to the national stage. The committee’s own poster stated it plainly: leverage the Magnet nursing culture to optimize organizational performance through inclusion, belonging, and a harm-free environment.
Trauma-informed care is not separate from that goal – it’s the path to it. That is the kind of nursing excellence Magnet surveyors are looking for.
What she built from one training
Jamie went on to present her committee’s work as a research poster at the Seattle Nursing Research Consortium and then took that poster to the Magnet conference in Chicago. She is now completing her DNP-CNM program, expanding her reach even further.
In her own words:
One trained nurse. One committee built from scratch when initial support was “meh.” 89-plus staff educated in the first session. A four-part curriculum centered in community voices. A research poster presented at a national conference. A postpartum debrief protocol in development.
That is the ripple effect of nurse-led trauma-informed care education done right.
Bring this to your team
If you are a nurse leader or hospital administrator looking to build a trauma-informed perinatal care culture, this is what the starting point looks like. It begins with one nurse who has the tools and the support to lead.
The Birth Nurse offers hospital training programs for perinatal teams, built around the same trauma-informed framework that lit Jamie’s fire. Get more information to learn what this looks like for your unit.
