Evaluation of a digital complex trauma webinar delivered in a secondary care mental health team.

A Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Team (CMHWT), that sits within Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust, developed a group intervention for clients that aimed to provide psychoeducation around trauma. In the face of Covid-19, barriers to accessing the group were evident and this consequentially resulted in increased waiting lists. The CMHWT responded to this by transforming the group intervention and developing a novel intervention, which took the form of a digital webinar. To assess the effectiveness of the webinar, an evaluation was conducted which aimed to measure the helpfulness of the webinar for clients under the care of CMHWT. A mixed-methods design was employed. For the quantitative data, paired samples t-tests and Wilcoxon signedrank tests were used. For the qualitative data, template analysis was used. Results showed that for all scales and subscales, the means were lower at post-intervention than pre-intervention, suggesting that the level of overall distress was lower following completion of the webinar. These differences were significant for four out of six subscales. Qualitative outcomes highlighted the strengths of the webinar and provided suggestions for how the webinar could be developed and improved for future delivery. In conclusion, the results suggested that the complex trauma webinar was effective in producing a global reduction of distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]