Expertise and Knowledge Required to Support Health Staff to Manage Stressful Events

Excerpt

Supporting health care staff after a stressful incident is a vital task, but also complex and challenging, as Skowronski and Kerridge’s response to our paper “Reflecting before, during, and after the heat of the moment: A review of four approaches for supporting health staff to manage stressful events" (Delany et al. 2021) indicates. They make two key points: (1) the evidence about Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), one of the forms of de-briefing that we discuss, is such that it should not have a place in routine practice; and (2) that clinical ethics consultations and psychotherapeutic interventions should be kept separate because separate and distinct expertise is required. On both of these points, the everyday reality of clinician support in a busy hospital environment is a complicating factor. …