Economic evaluation of child maltreatment : is there any place for prevention?

The last decade has seen a powerful shift in the collective attention to psychological trauma, with a convergence of voices from research, practice, and policy highlighting its prevalence and poor health outcomes consequences. The discussion paper explores healthcare utilization of traumatized populations and proposes trauma-informed policies that may provide more patient-centric care, as well as improving the accountability and responsiveness of the healthcare system. The emergence of Trauma Informed Care in service contexts has endeavoured to incorporate an understanding of trauma into their organisational structures, treatment services and day-to-day practices to decrease healthcare utilization and costs. This paper speculates that the future Holy Grail of trauma field is to find traction on strategies aimed at bending the healthcare utilization and cost curve of trauma-related healthcare policies. [Publisher's Text].