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PURPOSE

To establish guidelines for dealing with a critical stress incident (e.g., effects on incident personnel).

PROCEDURE

• A critical incident is defined as any incident faced by personnel that cause them to experience unusually strong emotional involvement.
• Examples of a critical incident include
  • Serious injury or death of a co-worker.
  • Mass casualty incidents.
  • Serious injury or death of a civilian resulting from emergency scene operations (e.g., auto accident, etc.).
  • Death of a child or violence to a child.
  • Suicide of a co-worker.
  • Loss of life of a patient following extraordinary and prolonged expenditure of physical and emotional energy during rescue efforts.
  • Incidents that attract extremely unusual or critical news media coverage.
  • Any incident that is charged with profound emotion.
  • Any incident in which the circumstances were so unusual or the sights and sound so distressing as to produce a high level of immediate or delayed emotional reaction.
• General signs and symptoms to be aware of
  • Obvious distress such as crying.
  • Shock looking (like a statue).
  • Unusual behavior.
  • Acting out of character.
• Immediate care.
  • If possible, remove the person from contact with visual, smell, and sounds of the scene for 15-30 minutes; then reassign to a different task.
  • If not possible to take out of service, reassign to another task.
• On-scene protection (minimizing the effects).
  • Brief before deployment. Let team members know what to expect.
  • Work as a team. Everyone goes in together, everyone comes out together.
  • Limit exposure to the scene. If they don't need to see it, don't let them.
  • Establish rest areas away from the scene.
  • Avoid high sugar and fatty foods, limit caffeine intake and, if possible, smoking.
  • Fifteen minute breaks should be given after every two hours of work.
  • Six hours maximum should be the limit of time working on a critical incident. After that, personnel should be returned to quarters and given another assignment.