Critical Incident Response Service
Critical Incidents
Critical incidents are any event which affects a workplace or community deeply, for example:
- robbery
- terrorism
- a fire
- a workplace accident
- the sudden death of a colleague or customer on- or offsite
Rowan Consultancy can help you navigate the complex feelings and emotions such events bring on and support you to move forward.
Critical Incident Response
Rowan offers a critical incident response service. Our role will be tailor-made to your incident, as no two cases are the same. An outline of some general principles and possibilities are shown below. We will be flexible to accommodate your organisation, your incident, and your circumstances. Rowan has experience of assisting with suicide, sudden death, fatal accidents and sustained harassment.
Why?
Our critical incident response aim is to:
- Support the leadership team in responding to the incident
- To help affected staff to begin processing and recovering from the incident.
We do this by:- recognising the abnormality of the incident
- normalising their individual responses to the incident
- educating on how to recover, reduce impact and increase resilience
- facilitating peer support.
What?
- If several colleagues, were affected then we usually offer a group session. It’s best to have separate groups for those who witnessed the event and those who didn’t. The group session lasts up to 2 hours, allowing colleagues to hear and support one another, as well as learning about common responses to trauma.
- This is followed by the opportunity for individual sessions with our counsellor
- We provide a Trauma leaflet, for you to distribute to affected staff, outlining the normal responses to a trauma and what helps.
- We offer a follow up session 4-6 week later.
- We recommend that an employee counselling service is made available to affected staff. Rowan can provide this if you do not already have one in place.
When?
Best practice is to relieve staff of their normal duties, immediately after the incident, and to provide space where they can gather together as a team, to support one another.
A few days later a Rowan counsellor comes onsite for a group session. This gives staff time to recover from the initial shock, and to notice how it is affecting them. We also offer a follow-up session a few weeks later.
Last year we engaged with Rowan Consultancy to facilitate a session with our staff team. Staff had previously experienced work related critical incidents which happened over a period of time and these had an impact on people’s confidence as individuals and as a team. Rowan consultancy agreed the format of the voluntary session in advance with the staff team. I also took part in the session. Rachel from Rowan Consultancy displayed empathy and emotional understanding throughout the session. The staff team and I later reflected and agreed the session was powerful and it allowed a safe place for people to explore issues and also tools for moving on. I would certainly recommend Rowan Consultancy to any organisation that may be considering engaging a consultant to carry out a Critical Incident Debriefing Service.
Find out more
To find out more and discuss you particular needs, simply call us on 01738 562005 or use our contact form and we will call you back as soon as possible.