Critical Incident Stress

A critical incident is a challenging event that has the potential to create significant human distress and can overwhelm one’s usual coping mechanisms. At work it is an event or situation that causes emotional and psychological trauma in the people exposed to it. It is usually a sudden, unexpected and powerful event outside the range of normal experiences and outside workers’ control. Examples include workplace accidents, robberies, explosions, fire, attempted or completed suicide, witnessing a person die, extreme violence and physical threats.

Critical Incident Stress Management is a multi-component crisis intervention approach to managing the effects of critical incident stress and typically includes pre-incident training, acute care and post- incident response. At Lynne Forrest & Associates we are on hand to respond to organisational needs at all three levels and to ensure that organisations can effectively meet their duty of care obligations from a moral, legal and business perspective.