When workplace trauma occurs in a workplace, whatever happens next is critical in terms of how employees respond, recover or continue.
There is a growing recognition that organisations not only need to attend to the legal, environmental and safety needs of employees, but also their psychological wellbeing. This is particularly crucial following workplace trauma.
ACCESS provides key services to assist organisations who have experienced trauma:
Critical Incident Support
If your organisation experiences a critical incident, you need an experienced, qualified response to assist your staff immediately.
Critical incidents may trigger a wide range of physical and psychological symptoms, including increased heart rate, high blood pressure and anxiety. If your organisation experiences a critical incident, you need an experienced, qualified response to assist your staff immediately.
The three key steps to effectively managing a critical incident or traumatic event are:
- Demobilisation: Critical incidents may trigger a wide range of physical and psychological symptoms, including increased heart rate, high blood pressure and anxiety. Demobilisation (rest, information and transition) is a way of calming workers following a critical incident and ensuring that their immediate needs are met. Our team can help you implement this process.
- Defusing: These are limited only to individuals directly involved in the incident. They are designed to assist individuals in coping in the short term and address immediate needs.
- Debriefing: This service is designed to be immediate and minimise the impact of trauma on employees.
It is imperative that your workplace has a clear workplace trauma response plan and is able to implement it as the need arises. Talk to an ACCESS Consultant on (08) 8215 6799 for more information on identifying risks in the workplace as well as policy and program development.
ACCESS Critical Incident Support provide comprehensive responses including 24 hour, seven-day access to debriefing for critical incidents.
If you have any other questions, you may find the answers in our Critical Incident Support FAQs.
On-site debriefing
Debriefing offers your workers clarity about the critical incident they have experienced and assists them to establish a process for recovery.
Debriefing is a structured voluntary discussion aimed at putting an abnormal event into perspective. It is not counselling; rather it offers workers clarity about the critical incident they have experienced and assists them to establish a process for recovery.
Our trained ACCESS Counsellors can help your workers to explore and understand a range of issues including:
- The sequence of events, their causes and consequences
- Each person’s experience and reaction to the incident
- Any memories triggered by the incident
- Normal psychological reactions to critical incidents
- Methods to manage emotional responses resulting from a critical incident
If you would like to talk to our team about this crucial part of critical incident management, please do not hesitate to contact us.
