‘Not bulletproof ’: The organisation helping emergency workers
First responders are regularly exposed to trauma, stress and burnout. So who is helping those we turn to in times of crisis? Mariné Lourens reports.
Brendon Hutchinson has been a paramedic for more than 20 years, but it took a steam pudding for him to realise that he wasn’t as “bulletproof” as he thought. Hutchinson, who has been a first responder at crash scenes, medical events, suicides and serious assaults, was making a pudding for a Sunday roast when he dropped eggshell into the batter.
“I just lost it and flew off the handle. Batter went all across the kitchen. And my wife, who is an amazing woman, just looked at me and said, ‘You need to go talk to someone’.”
Through his employer, Hato Hone St John, Hutchinson did end up talking to someone – and was put in touch with Te Kiwi Māia (courageous Kiwi), a charitable organisation providing mental health support, rehabilitation and respite to first responders.
It was “an eye-opener”.
“If you told me three years ago that work was getting to me, I would’ve laughed and said, ‘Nah, it’s all good’. But going on a course with Te Kiwi Māia and sitting in a room with other first responders, you realise we all talk the same language – missed family times, long hours, work coming first.
“And you don’t realise until you go to something like this that yeah, everything is not great.”
Hutchinson’s experience is not unique. Numerous studies have shown that first responders, including emergency medical technicians, paramedics, firefighters and police officers, are at an increased risk of serious mental health issues.
Research done in the United States has shown that about 30% of first responders develop behavioural health conditions, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compared to 20% of the general population. Another study showed that emergency service providers are 1.39 times more likely to die by suicide than the general public.
While first responders are often exposed to trauma, there are many other factors that contribute to the physical and mental demands of the job, clinical and organisational psychologist Rajna Bogdanovic says.
Bogdanovic is the founder of First Response Health, and serves on Te Kiwi Maia’s advisory board, as well as assisting in creating and running its programmes.
“First responders work in a high-stakes environment,” she says. “They need to make quick decisions in very high-pressure situations where often someone’s life depends on them.”
Consistently dealing with people who are going through some of the worst moments of their lives takes a psychological toll. This is exacerbated by long hours and shift work, which affects sleep, downtime and family time, Bogdanovic says.
“Probably one of the biggest challenges is that first responders work in a high-demand, low-control workplace. The demand placed on them is really challenging, but the control they have over the work they do is actually very limited. They have to go out to do the job, no matter the circumstances.” In 2013, Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Fenz) reached an agreement with St John to attend all life-threatening cardiac or respiratory arrest emergencies. While this meant firefighters were often able to get to the scene much quicker than an ambulance could, these jobs were often incredibly difficult to respond to.
“This co-response to calls resulted in really good outcomes for the public, but it took a toll on us firefighters. In a space of about 2½ years, three of my firefighter friends took their own lives,” Tauranga-based senior firefighter Brendon Dunn says.
It was “a big wake-up call” about the impact the job could have on someone’s mental health, he says.
Te Kiwi Māia co-founder Rebecca Nelson says it was only when she joined the Royal New Zealand Navy as a reservist that she realised the impact that working in the Defence Force can have on staff. Born and bred in Christchurch, Nelson was busking on the streets of Devonport when she was approached by the musical director of the Navy Band.
After visiting a recovery centre for service veterans in Britain run by the charitable organisation Help for Heroes, Nelson knew she wanted to create something similar in New Zealand to help first responders here. She joined friends and fellow navy members Megan Mashali and James Burt to establish Te Kiwi Māia in 2020.
Te Kiwi Māia runs week-long live-in programmes for small groups of first responders that include therapy from experts, including clinical psychologists, rongoā Māori practitioners, personal trainers, sleep specialists and trauma-based yoga practitioners.
It is this holistic approach that makes Te Kiwi Māia unique and different from the support that individual organisations offer their employees, Nelson says.
“Perhaps more importantly, Te Kiwi Māia programmes give first responders an opportunity to speak to others in similar positions to share their challenges, fears and frustrations in a neutral environment.
“There is also ongoing support afterwards to give them the tools to cope with the mental demands of their jobs and know when they need to ask for help.”
The frequency of programmes depends on funding, as Te Kiwi Māia is fully dependent on fundraising to do its work.
Organisations whose employees are helped by Te Kiwi Māia include St John, Fenz, NZ Police, the New Zealand Defence Force, Westpac Lifesaver Rescue Helicopter Service, the Coast Guard, Surf Lifesaving, and Land Search and Rescue.
The dream is to have three permanent homesteads that run programmes fulltime, Nelson says.
“The need is big enough, because it is not just fulltime staff we look after, it is also all the volunteers and all the veterans – we’re looking after 500,000 people and their families.”
“The programmes we are currently running are for burnout and stress. We’re starting a programme this year where we are going to look at the partners of first responders who suffer from PTSD. The next programmes we are currently researching would be to address trauma and PTSD.”
Nelson hopes Te Kiwi Māia’s success stories will help to gain support for the organisation – and perhaps even government funding in the future – to allow it to continue to expand its work and help more people.
“What Te Kiwi Māia does amazingly is advocacy and change,” Bogdanovic says.
”Having a collective of first responders can be so powerful for activating systemic change, and that is exactly what is happening. We don’t have just the individuals speaking, but those on senior levels coming together and starting to create change within the organisations.“
In the end, it is about strengthening the hands of those who are there to help when others need it most, Nelson says.
“Te Kiwi Māia means the courageous Kiwi. As a first responder, you have to have courage to sign up for the job in the first place, you have to have courage to put your hand up and ask for help, and you have to have courage to leave when you realise you have done your time in this role.
“These people have courage through their whole life, and they deserve to be supported.”
Dear Diary: Carly Gooch
Ihave two diaries, one on my office desk, and one in my handbag — and actually, if you count the giant 2024 calendar on the pantry wall, that makes a trifecta to ensure my life is organised. Yeah, I could just put them in Google calendars, but I think you’ve learned from my verging-on-Boomer mentality that digital just ain’t my jam.
I’m forever asking for a pen over the counter at the doctors, the hairdresser, the vet, and whoever else I’m making future appointments with, ensuring I diarise the booking. It’s not enough that they give me a card or assure me they’ll send a reminder text the day before – it’s too late by that point.
My diary obsession probably began with the Dinky Diary Organiser. (Did those three words provoke a flashback?) It was the peak of cool at school in the late ’80s-early ’90s, and it made me feel grown-up – as if I was carrying a briefcase, except it was slightly smaller than A5, brightly coloured, and had Australian cartoon animals on the front. The bonus was that it came with stickers, so instead of just writing “Birthday”, you could jazz it up by using the special “Birthday” sticker.
These days, it’s not so much my social calendar that’s full, more like health appointments with an ageing body.
Sometimes I fly by the seat of my pants like Mike, just committing bookings to memory, but that’s setting up to fail.
I recently asked a disorganised Mike what time his tattoo appointment was (spoiler alert for the next LHR column), and he fumbled for the appointment card in his wallet ... that wasn’t there. He knew he was giving me exactly the fodder I needed.
He thought he knew the time – it turned out he was intending to turn up about six hours too early.
If only he wrote it in a diary. (Mike’s note: Or, you know, confirmed the time two weeks in advance and then just remembered.)
Moments later, when he asked what shift I was on that day (shift work is a minefield to keep track of), I was able to whip out my pocket diary and tell him straight away.
I’m sounding smug, but my system isn’t infallible.
It was marked on the giant wall calendar and my pocket diary to pick up my parents from the airport on a particular day in February, following a couple of weeks in Australia. Then, out of the blue,
I got a call from Mum saying they were ready to be picked up.
Oh no. They were a day early! Well, they weren’t really, they were on time, and I was unintentionally going to be a day late because I’d marked the incorrect day on the wall calendar.
I was forgiven, eventually. My defence was, “I wrote it down, I just got the wrong day”.
Dear oh dear diary: Michael Wright
I’m writing this on a Thursday. I usually do it on a Thursday, but this week I had to because I was on leave on Friday. The harder deadline occurred to me on Monday or Tuesday, when I was organising the rest of the week in my head. Then I forgot about it until Thursday morning, and was about to do something else when it floated back into my frontal cortex and I thought, “That’s right, I have to do Love-Hate today”, and the process seemed illustrative, so I wrote that paragraph. You’re welcome.
Yes, I could have written it down, but I didn’t. I just sort of remembered, and that is how I’ve survived four decades on this earth. My life is organised to the extent that it has to be to avoid being arrested, divorced, fired or bankrupted.
I don’t love that it’s this way. It means I have to rely on my memory and sometimes other, more organised, people. But I just can’t bring myself to write down a bunch of mundane shit I would have remembered anyway in order to have a failsafe on the handful of things I might not.
I try. God knows I try. Despite having a decent memory, I am also somehow the most forgetful person I know, so I see the benefit in limiting this state of perpetual mild panic to the whereabouts of my keys/ phone/wallet/sunnies.
Every year, I buy a diary and dutifully begin writing down all the things. My January is swamped. February is busyish, but it’s no January. Things really slow down in March and then some time in April I am presumably kidnapped or lose my writing arm in a devastating scheduling clash, and my diary sits pristine for the rest of the year.
Sometimes I daydream about being the subject of a missing persons investigation, and the cops have to try to make sense of my diary, like on every police procedural show ever. What does ‘ND’ on the 12th mean? some trench-coated DS would wonder. It’s the first thing he’s written in months. Tell you what, gov, it’s either the key to this whole case, or the victim was on a news directing shift at work that day and he wrote it down in a pathetic attempt at forward planning.
Of course, I do write some things down. You can’t be a reporter and a complete scheduling refusenik. OIA reminders, interview times, meetings, “call so-andso_ – if it’s important enough, I’ll make a record of it. If not, it doesn’t matter.
The bigger downside will be when a publisher inevitably calls to ask a celebrated writer like me to join the canon of esteemed literary diarists, and my quotidian musings turn out to be less than Orwellian. But as the great man once observed, the real story of a life is in its humiliations. I can remember those.