Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM)
CISM is an effective debriefing procedure to help normalise the often overwhelming psychological, physiological and emotional responses to minor, moderate and severe critical incidents.
What is a Critical Incident?
A Critical Incident is any traumatic event or situation that creates a significant risk of substantial harm to the physical and/or mental health, safety or wellbeing of an individual.
You don’t need to be directly involved in a critical incident to be affected by an it. Close witnesses are as likely to be affected. And while the injuries caused by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have damaging consequences, they can worsen an individual’s mental health.
How do organisations benefit from Critical Incident Stress Management?
Minimising operational downtime while doing your utmost to protect employee wellbeing can be challenging. This is especially true for SMEs who may not have all the resources at their disposal to deal with critical incidents.
Without the right support to help an employee after a distressing incident, you risk not complying with your duty of care in accordance with HSE and employment safeguarding legislation. That’s why at HA | Wisdom Wellbeing, CISM is offered as standard with our Employee Assistance Programme to make compliance seamless. With our support, businesses can observe:
Decreased absences
Reduced turnover
Improved employee retention
Reduced risk of legal claims and healthcare costs
A reduced risk of financial loss due to long-term sick leave
What is CISM and how does it help my people?
CISM is designed to help individuals in an organisation deal with their trauma one incident at a time, by allowing them to talk about the incident when it happens without judgment or criticism.
First developed for use with military combat veterans and then civilian first responders (police, fire, ambulance, emergency workers and disaster rescuers), it has now been adapted and used virtually everywhere there is a need to address traumatic impact in people's lives.
We have a robust process in place to manage high-risk traumatic situations and critical incidents, and day-to-day unexpected incidents, that is supported by an experienced UK and international network of specialist CISM personnel.
Benefits of CISM for your people
We recognise the impact of critical incidents on individuals, levels of distress, mental health and the impact that it may have on being able to perform their role effectively or attend work.
We design our critical incident counselling to enhance employees’ natural resilience and provide specialist support to minimise effects of trauma and promote wellbeing and recovery. It is a system of support that is meant to do the following:
Lessen the impact of the critical incident
Normalise instinctive reactions to the incident
Encourage the natural recovery process
Restore the adaptive functioning skills of the person and/or group
Determine the need for further supportive services or therapy
Types of CISM
When developing a critical incident stress management plan, there are several types of CISM techniques that can we can deploy, either in tandem with other together or individually.
CISD
CISM debriefing is a proactive form of intervention involving a group meeting or discussion about a particularly distressing critical incident. We know this as critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) or critical incident debriefing (CID). In a typical CISM debrief, we reach these objectives through group discussions. These cover an introduction, overview of the situation, the group’s impressions, impacts, signals of distress, stress management and summary.
Types of CISM
1:1 support
After a break, there is the option to have drop-in sessions on a one-to-one basis with the critical incident responder, to discuss further stress management and recovery techniques in a confidential manner.
Grief and loss sessions
Grief and loss sessions are a structured group or individual session following a death and assists people in understanding their own grief reactions as well as creating a healthy atmosphere of openness and dialogue.
Frequently asked questions about critical incident stress management
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