Changes in service use during a trauma-informed intervention for women

We examined the patterns of services used by women with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems with histories of interpersonal violence, and examined the change in patterns of use associated with a targeted intervention as part of the Women, Co-Occurring Disorders, and Violence Study. As hypothesized, we observed that intervention women (n=1023) used more of the main service type that the intervention was focused on providing, outpatient group counseling. The intervention did not have strong effects on patterns of service use external to the intervention, such as emergency room, jail, and shelter use in the first six months of follow-up. The reasons for the stability in patterns of services use are likely complex and imply that the observed increased access to group counseling was not being used as a substitute for other types of services, especially individual counseling, since use of these other services did not decrease during the study period.