Welcome to Episode 5 of Assuming Command with Angela Leath. Bob had the privilege of hiring Angela to be the Crisis Intervention Administrator for Las Vegas Fire and Rescue in 2015. Angela now works for the City of Henderson as their Public Safety Wellness Program Manager and offers training in Mental Fitness and Critical Incident Stress Management Program Building through her business, Leathalminds, LLC. You can find Angela and Leathalminds, LLC on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/leathal-minds/.
Angela has had a long career in mental health, or mental fitness as she prefers to call it, and she provided a wealth of information during this episode on building a peer support program, utilizing the program, and training both peer support teams and the overall organization. Here are some of our key takeaways from the conversation.
When building a program, it is important to consider the size of your organization, including all divisions or sections, including everyone from maintenance, training, call-takers/dispatch, to first responders. Peers from and for all areas need to be included. There needs to be enough members on a Peer Support Team to be able to provide support without members of the team burning out. If your organization isn’t large enough to support its own Peer Support Team, consider a regional approach by partnering with other agencies.
Training to support mental fitness will help employees build resiliency before they need it. Training should start in recruit academy’s, a Peer Support Mentor should be assigned to rookies, mental fitness and resiliency should be regularly incorporated into trainings, and retirees should be both prepared for transition into retirement and offered the opportunity to stay engaged in their organization after they retire. Families should also be integrated into the process; it’s important for families to understand to some degree the stress first responders are dealing with and how it may impact them at home.
Angela also discussed the important of Critical Incident Stress Management, which is trained in intervention techniques for larger scale or more traumatic incidents, whereas the Peer Support Team is used for more day-to-day type stressors. She described critical incidents as a bullseye, with the incident in the center and the rings being made up of people and their interaction with the incident. Training on how to deploy the team during a critical incident, all the way through the de-brief process. Identification and utilization of outside resources and having a plan with your EAP are also integral to the preparation process.
Angela mentioned a variety of training and support programs. We’ve linked those for you here.
· CHIPS: https://www.snvchips.org/about
· IAFF Training: https://www.iaff.org/behavioral-health/#peer-support
· Mental Health First Aid Training: https://www.thenationalcouncil.org/training-courses/mental-health-first-aid/
· Psychological First Aid Training: https://learn.nctsn.org/course/index.php?categoryid=11
· K9 First Responders: https://k9fr.org/
