About the Emotional Safety Initiative

The Association of Child Life Professionals defines emotional safety as:

An intentional, interdisciplinary practice to promote resiliency, healing, and trust for pediatric patients and their families during medical experiences.

The Emotional Safety Initiative is a movement to prioritize emotional safety at the same level as physical safety in all pediatric medical experiences. We know that by centering the emotional needs of children and families in every aspect of care,—from environment to treatment plans—we can help eliminate trauma and stress that leads to potential lifelong health implications.

Healthcare providers also pay a price for the staffing logistics, institutional policies, time constraints, and inadequate staffing that can lead to harmful care. Delivering emotionally unsafe care leads to burnout, distress, and job dissatisfaction.   

Our Emotional Safety in Pediatrics paper outlines these consequences and promotes widespread adoption of specialized strategies including atraumatic, patient and family-centered, trauma-informed, culture-centered, and developmentally appropriate care to create a new standard of emotionally safe care around the world.  

The framework of the Emotional Safety Initiative is built from four pillars of focus: screening and assessment; intervention; environment; and education, training, and communication.