What is a Critical Incident?

Critical incidents are situations with the potential to cause psychological harm to employees and may occur inside or outside the workplace.

What does the Critical Incident Support – Debriefing involve?

As traumatic events such as threats, assaults and accidents are becoming more common in the workplace, employees are requiring more support to overcome the acute stress reactions they may experience on top of the everyday stresses. ACCESS’s critical incident support services provide comprehensive responses including 24 hour / 7 day access to a debriefing for critical incidents. The service is designed to be immediate and minimise the impact of critical incidents on staff. For example: workplace accidents, sudden death or injury of employees, involvement in violent confrontations such as an assault or armed hold-up.

What does the Critical Incident Support – Other Stressful Work Situations involve?

Apart from core Critical Incidents, there are a range of critical incidents that may benefit from ACCESS’ on-site counselling or group debriefing service even though they are not technically ‘critical incidents’. These include incidents related to grief and loss and general workplace stress: redundancy, death outside work of someone well known to the organisation, diagnosis of life threatening illness and losses of family, cumulative stress, organisational change, organisational culture, workplace bullying, burnout and vicarious trauma.

Do ACCESS Consultants provide on-site debriefing?

Critical Incident Support is a 24 hour, seven day a week service. Counsellors can be on-site within specified rapid response times to provide individual and/or group psychological first-aid. By arrangement with the organisation, the counsellor will conduct a post-incident follow-up.

Will organisations receive a report after a Critical Incident?

Organisations that require a Critical Incident report will receive a comprehensive report of the incident completed by the counsellor after the follow-up process has been completed.

Do ACCESS Consultants provide assistance with a workplace trauma response plan?

ACCESS can assist your organisation to prepare for critical incidents through consultancy on aspects of critical incident management, policies and procedures.

Do ACCESS Consultants provide Critical Incident Support training at all levels?

ACCESS design and deliver tailored training programs in critical incident management for both managers / supervisors as well as general staff.

What would ACCESS offer during a Critical Incident?

ACCESS has extensive experience in providing counselling and trauma management across the full range of critical incidents. Our range of services is designed to limit the impact of critical incidents on employees and organisations. Our approach is underpinned by current research on critical incident and trauma management with the aim of fostering resilience and facilitating recovery.