TO REINFORCE RESCUERS' RESILIENCE BY EMPOWERING A WELL-BEING DIMENSION

Transcription

1 TO REINFORCE RESCUERS' RESILIENCE BY EMPOWERING A WELL-BEING DIMENSION

2 Over recent years, civil protection programs have begun focusing on ever more complex issues, and the profile of human resources that intervene in crisis situations is undergoing deep-rooted transformation. For example emergency personnel now frequently receive training in psychological "first aid" for victims, given that it is police officers, firefighters, and specialized units, Red Cross volunteers, who are the first people to arrive on the scene and to establish human contact with victims. Yet, although these professionals must summon all of their abilities and intervention skills to rescue, aid, and contain injury to disaster victims, they must also manage a severely compromised psychological and emotionally involving situation. Emergency workers must remain calm, maintain authority, coordinate activities, and rely on their own personal and collective experience to make the rapid and effective decisions upon which lives and livelihoods depend. They can therefore end up taking on a heavy emotional and psychological burden

3 Emergency workers usually develop a rather high tolerance threshold for situations that, occasionally or chronically, may put their psychological and emotional equilibrium at risk. Yet, the risk for these highly exposed individuals becoming seriously involved in the traumatic experiences of the people they rescue (vicarious traumatisation) deserves more consideration that it is currently receiving. There is a striking variety in activities, methods, and approaches to psychosocial support for emergency personnel, all which depend upon prevailing theories, economic resources, culture, and situational characteristics. The idea is gradually emerging that psychosocial interventions require advance preparation and must be effectively co-ordinated and structured during the various emergency management and intervention phases

4 GENERAL AIMS We underscore the need to investigate two new aspects of the concept of support for emergency crews: 1) each worker's own psychological burden in an emergency, 2) the issue of training workers who intervene in mass emergencies The specific proposal concerns : 1. the enhancement of the well-being of personnel intervening in MEs, by identifying the main dimensions that can determine their well-being, the promotion of which can strengthen their capacity to cope with high-stress situations. 2. the design of consolidated and shared training programmes for ME operators and after-care providers, with the aim of providing useful instruments for the psycho-physical-social support of rescue teams, not only after, but during, the event itself.

5 ESPECTED RESULTS The results of the workshop, the major project and the tools developed will be known and potentially used all around Europe, and these could be divided in two areas A) Workshop: consolidation of the state of the art in matter of psychosocial and after-care support, and creation of a network of experts on the same topic. The workshop will be preliminary to the major project and will have the aim of learning more about our understanding of the field, through the exchange of knowledge and experience of international experts and personnel who operate daily in the ME field.

6 B) Major project: a well-being questionnaire to specifically assess individual emergency workers' well-being (in terms of their subjective perceptions, with reference to the quality of their lives in general, but mostly, to their working lives, with the aim of pinpointing which dimensions can impact them more positively or negatively. Design of a training course for ME operators and after-care providers. As a result of this action, a training programme will be designed and devised in the form of modules per single subject (with the corresponding practices/exercises to be performed depending on the profile type participating in the training), ready for the final assessment and validation. On the other hand, an expected result of the training action is the creation of a new professional profile that will fit into organizations dealing with ME

7 PARTNERS IN THE PROJECT Croce Rossa Italiana Comitato Regionale del Piemonte Croix Rouge Francaise Sinergie S.r.l. Facoltà di Psicologia Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Psicologia - Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Pavia Regione Autonoma della Valle d Aosta Fondo Formacion Euskadi Stichting Impact, Landelijk kennis & adviescentrum voor psychosociale zorg na rampen

8 Total duration Jan 2007-Dec 2008