Our People

The TRB team brings together skilled clinicians, researchers, and policy leaders dedicated to raising standards in trauma care. With expertise across health, justice, education, and social care, we combine lived experience with professional practice to deliver evidence-based, trauma-focused reform. Our shared commitment is simple: to protect the public and create systems where recovery and dignity are possible for every individual.

Where Insight Meets Oversight

The Trauma Regulation Board (TRB) is an independent UK regulatory body established to set and uphold national standards for trauma-specialist practice across multiple sectors. Our purpose is to bring cohesion, safety, and accountability to a field that has long operated without consistent oversight, despite trauma being one of the most significant public health issues of our time.

TRB exists to address a systemic failure: while trauma is implicated in outcomes across mental health, safeguarding, criminal justice, and education, there is no statutory body regulating how trauma care is delivered. We are changing that.

Our approach is grounded in a neuroscience-informed, tri-phasic model of trauma recovery, and built on a competency-based, interdisciplinary framework. TRB will regulate trauma practice across health, mental health, education, social care, domestic abuse, and criminal justice—ensuring services are not only trauma-informed, but clinically safe, legally defensible, and ethically sound.

We are currently undergoing review for Professional Standards Authority (PSA) accreditation and preparing for phased national implementation. Our higher education programmes will be externally quality-assured and credit-rated by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), forming part of an integrated pathway from training to professional registration.

The Board Behind the Mission

TRB is shaped and guided by a multi-disciplinary Advisory Board of leading figures in psychiatry, neuroscience, forensic psychology, social work, education, cyber governance, and survivor advocacy. This board is not symbolic—it is strategic. It ensures that regulation is not created in isolation but is rooted in frontline realities, informed by clinical precision, and ready for system-wide impact.

Every Advisory Board member plays a critical role in aligning the regulatory framework with real-world practice—so that what we build is not only visionary, but viable..

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PHD (current) Rachel Fairhurst

CEO & Founder

Rachel Fairhurst is a specialised trauma practitioner, educator, and reform strategist with over a decade of experience in trauma-focused intervention and systemic transformation. As CEO of the Trauma Regulation Board, currently under Professional Standards Authority (PSA) review, Rachel is leading the creation of the UK’s first regulatory body dedicated to trauma-specific practice, accreditation, and governance.

PHD Mental Health & Criminology Cardiff Met,(current)
MSc in Clinical Psychiatry , University of South Wales

PG Dip Traumatology

Author

Read Rachel's Profile here

Dr Zoe Cross

PhD, Desistance and the Working Relationship: The Perceptions of Practitioners and Young People, University of South Wales

Criminologist and Psychologist
Bringing trauma-focused practice to Youth Justice

Supervisor
PHD Lecturer

Read Zoe's Profile here

Tom Hawkins

Tom is the director for integrating Trauma focused practice into the discipline of Social work in the UK

BSc Law degree , University of Wolverhampton
MSc in Social Work at Birmingham University,

Co-Author to Trauma focused social work

Inside Kinship care

Read Tom's Profile Here

Marilyn Hawes

PCEO of Freedom From Abuse, The UK's leading public advocate for preventing child abuse, addressing the challenges of child abuse in a quick effective manner and in so doing limits the impact of abuse.