Trauma-informed practice · Risk assessment
Trauma set
Twelve dice. What happened to this person?
A trauma-informed adaptation of TRIAGED. The risk focus stays, but the person students build is shaped by what has happened to them rather than by a psychiatric history. An adverse childhood experiences die takes the place of mental health history, and a second die adds trauma experienced or witnessed in adulthood.
Twelve dice, six faces each, rolled in order. Click the highlighted box to roll, or press Roll next die.
Adapted in collaboration with Dr Jessica MacLaren, University of Stirling, for the undergraduate mental health nursing module Trauma Informed Mental Health Practice.
Montgomery, A., & MacLaren, J. (2025). TF-TRIAGED [Dice-based mental health education game].
In practice, information about a person rarely arrives all at once. It emerges over time, and sometimes it changes what you thought you knew. TRIAGED is designed to mirror that: each die brings new information, and your clinical decision making has to adapt as it lands.
- Roll one die at a time, in order.
- As a group, build the result into your person combining what you have learned in university and in clinical practice. How might this present in someone, and how does it fit with what you already know? The dice give you the prompt; your knowledge and experience supply the detail.
- Before you roll again, note the risks this raises and your rationale. Be ready to revise earlier assessments as new information emerges.
- When every die has been rolled, decide what you would do next.
In preparation
Your patient
Work through it as a handover. What is your immediate risk assessments? How might what has happened to this person shape how they present today, and what would a trauma-informed response to the final die look like?
Before you start
This version asks students to hold childhood adversity, abuse, sexual violence and war in mind at once. Adverse childhood experiences are common, and some students will recognise their own history in the dice. Brief the group first, make stepping out easy and unremarkable, and leave time for debrief. There is fuller guidance on running it with a group.
This is an educational tool where participants generate a composite service user via dice rolls. While we encourage participants to draw on their own practice experiences, no roll describes a real person, and no combination is meant to be read as a predictive risk score.