Supporting Your Team in the Face of Trauma

Critical Incident Stress Management

How do you offer meaningful assistance to your employees in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy? The crisis recedes into the past—but traumatic stress often lingers. How do you give them lasting support?

Workers responding to emergency events, caught in disasters, or put under acute stress have experiences that strain their ability to function. According to OSHA, most symptoms of critical incident stress last for a few days to a month. But they don’t just evaporate on their own. The physical and psychological well-being of those who endure these stresses depends on our response as a group. How we help them manage the stress of the critical incident play a major role in the speed and ease of their return to their old work and life rhythms.

Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) Services

CARE is noted for our trauma-support and critical incident stress management (CISM) services. We currently provide CISM services to organizations that utilize our Employee Assistance Program. These range from corporate entities to municipalities, schools, and especially to firefighters, first responders, EMTs, and other emergency services personnel.

CARE’s trauma-informed CISM services are “people first.” Because we understand each individual has a unique experience of trauma, we offer an array of services, resources, and referrals to support multiple paths for recovering from an incident.

Incident response starts with a phone call to CARE. Our team will then provide management consultation to determine the best type of CISM response—which could include onsite critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) or onsite grief support to your team. In the case of a significant media event, we are able to provide assistance every step of the way—not just debriefing and counseling for your staff, but also helping you prepare and disseminate messaging to the community at large, and support those outside your organization affected by the tragedy.

In contrast to many CISM providers, CARE draws on a deep well of in-house clinical expertise with traumatic stress, best-practice standards for interventions, and evidence-based approaches to public health and well-being. Our core team is certified through the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF).

Because of our experience working with emergency services and first responders, we can assist you with pre-crisis planning as well as post-crisis support. We can help you assess issues of concern or likely scenarios in advance, and then work with you to implement a trauma-informed environment that will help better support your employees, teams, and first responders.

"We have utilized their Critical Incident Stress Debriefing after incidents where our firefighters responded to fatal crashes or other difficult runs. … I believe CARE provides a safety net to all of our employees. This is a benefit not only to our employees but also to us as the employer."