Understanding of how to support survivor wellbeing, trauma processing and recovery is constantly developing. It is good practice to build in a culture of openness, learning and evaluation into your service and to base your delivery on currently available evidence.

Ideally your evidence should be drawn from robust sources which integrate and synthesise current published literature from numerous studies and evaluations which are informed by practitioners and survivors. Some of the interventions directed at complex trauma (e.g. EMDR) by their design lend themselves more easily to being researched or evaluated and therefore there is a stronger evidence base.

In some circumstances, evidence may be more difficult to gather, for example where there are ethical considerations (such as the potential survivors may be retraumatised by research tools or processes), or where resources have not been made available to design and gather appropriate evidence.

Organisations supporting survivors strive to be survivor-centred and trauma-informed, as such you should place a number of other factors alongside your consideration of evidence as illustrated below.