Psychological first-aid plan
Acollaborative project between the region’s health services will aim to boost front-line workers’ knowledge to help people who are recovering from a traumatic experience.
Healthcare leaders are encouraging staff to take an online six-hour psychological first-aid training course to broaden their skills to support people with high levels of stress.
The project links the Wimmera’s four health services – Edenhope and District Memorial Hospital, Rural Northwest Health, West Wimmera Health Service and Wimmera Health Care Group.
The organisations joined forces with Wimmera Primary Care Partnership to deliver the Phoenix Australia program.
Clinical psychologist Megan Dennison helped form a psychological first-aid steering group with Wimmera healthcare leaders to establish the program, open to all healthcare workers.
Ms Dennison said the program was in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to enable healthcare workers to support colleagues as well as the community.
“This program is being delivered to acknowledge that in the broader community high levels of stress are arising due to COVID-19,” she said.
“Psychological first-aid training is an entry level support that you might provide to someone who is experiencing distress that is either highly traumatic or highly stressful.
“Importantly, as it is not counselling or mental-health treatment, it can help people to seek out professional mentalhealth care, often reducing some of the barriers people might have in getting the help they need.”
Ms Dennison said the steering group planned to roll the program out to 250 people after running a successful pilot program that included 20 workers.
“We’ve received really positive feedback from a pilot group that has just completed the online training,” she said.
“We’ll be announcing a date for the full intake very soon.
“What we recognised through feedback from our health services is we need to be offering this kind of training and support to anyone working in that essential healthcare environment.”
Ms Dennison said the course would teach workers core skills of psychological first-aid including simple psychological strategies and enable people to gain the confidence to assist and support individuals experiencing trauma.
“It’s about understanding the nature of trauma and the impacts it can have on individuals, families, work teams and communities,” she said.
“It helps to give those who are delivering it the skills and knowledge to help reduce initial stress and assist people to cope better in the days and weeks following a traumatic experience.
“That can include things like disasters, workplace incidents or assaults.”
Ms Dennison said extending the training to all workers across the region was key to improving the ability to provide psychological care across the Wimmera’s healthcare sector.
“One of the objectives is to increase that understanding. It’s a shared understanding and shared language for what’s helpful and what kind of impacts we might expect and what to look out for to help others,” she said.
The course is designed for a range of frontline professionals and community volunteers such as first responders, peer supporters, crisis response team members, disaster relief providers, primary care, emergency and mental health providers, Employee Assistance Program providers, workplace managers and supervisors.