Collaborative Care for Refugees, Torture, and War Trauma Survivors in Primary Care Elearning Series

Collaborative care is a holistic approach to clinical service delivery. This approach is inclusive of physical, behavioral, and various psychosocial factors to meet an individual’s comprehensive health needs in a primary care setting. This series aims to elaborate on collaborative care as it applies to forcibly displaced client communities, who have been resettled in Western countries, such as the United States.

A case study of a newcomer to the U.S. is woven throughout the lessons in this series to demonstrate ways providers can work together to provide services aligned with best practices in the field.

This series discusses guiding principles of collaborative care and describes how a newcomer experiences interacting with providers in the healthcare field. It provides guidance for assessing refugee patients and how they might discuss their presenting symptoms with providers including cultural idioms of distress which have the potential for being misinterpreted by Western providers. This self-guided lesson series includes the essentials of client engagement with treatment planning, medication management, and other services, along with elements of how to attend to physical health including basic and psychosocial needs. Additionally, this series provides a framework for working with interpreters and mitigating secondary trauma for providers.

While it is recommended that providers interested in this series go through the lessons in order, it is not necessary to do so. Please feel free to pick and choose the specific topics you want to focus on.

The suggested order of the courses is:

• Introduction to Collaborative Care

• Assessment and Symptoms Presentation

• Treatment Planning

• Psychosocial Well-Being: Basic Needs (Part One)

• Psychosocial Well-Being: Behavioral Health Interventions (Part Two)

Certificates of Completion are available to those who complete each course and get 80% or higher on the assessment.

Please note: You must have an account on the website and be logged in as either a full member or an elearning subscriber.

If you experience technical difficulties that you cannot resolve, please contact Sara Bracewell, at NCB.