The Rivers Centre in Scotland: An Attachment-Based Service Model for People With Complex Posttraumatic Stress...

The Rivers Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland (United Kingdom) operated for nearly 20 years as a traditional specialist trauma service, delivering psychological therapies to an adult population affected by trauma. Embedded in a health and social care system whose characteristics were unhelpful for people with histories of insecure attachment experiences, the Rivers Centre aimed to find a different way of working, and in January 2017, it relaunched with a new model of service. The aim of this paper is to describe the new service model from an organizational perspective in the context of attachment theory. At the heart of the model is the premise that to be effective, a trauma service needs to provide people with an alternative model of attachment. Early signs from service audit data indicate that an attachment-based way of working can improve engagement and can provide a supportive and responsive environment in which people can learn to recover.