CISM Team Helps Okla. Firefighters Heal After Incident (5/7/12 - Oklahoma)
Garfield County Sheriff Bill Winchester said emergency responders have learned over the years it’s important to have critical incident stress management sessions after a highly traumatic call — a session where those who dealt with the emergency can deal with the emotions they pushed aside during the crisis.
The intense trauma of some calls can be so troubling to first responders they quit their jobs afterward, Winchester said. The Kremlin Fire Depart-ment experienced that after Bryce and Tyler’s accident.
“We’ve had two walk away,” said Krem-lin Fire Chief Derrick Harris
About 90 percent of emergency workers will experience critical-incident stress at some point in their careers, Lillie said.
“Out of a single incident, about 30 percent will do fine, about 30 percent will have moderate critical-incident stress, and for about 30 percent, it will be severe,” Lillie said.
The Northwest Oklahoma Cri-tical Incident Stress Management team brings three peers, a chaplain and a mental health professional together to meet in an incident debriefing with the emergency responders.
“We have several stages we go through during the debriefing,” Lillie said. “The first is their initial response to the incident — what they did, what they saw.”

 

Drastic situations call for CIST | The Equinox (4/11/12 - New Hampshire)
This is where the Critical Incident Support Team (CIST) makes its mark. In an article written in December 2011 for Student Affairs eNews, author Mona Anderson ...

According to Anderson, the assistant director of the Counseling Center at Keene State College, the team has been trained in two areas: psychological first aid and critical incident stress debriefing.

Critical incident stress debriefing focuses on the specific protocol the members would use with a group that has been affected by the incident.

Brian Quigley, the director of the Counseling Center is notified of an event that is possibly critical. A lot of events are relayed to Quigley because he is the person who makes the executive decision of whether or not an incident is actually critical.