Work-related stress has the potential to jeopardize performance, safety, health, and relationships for many employees in human service professions. Identifying early warning signs of trauma exposure can minimize the impact on staff, enhance healthy coping, and prevent the negative effects of cumulative stress.
Peer support programs offer a sustainable and cost effective means to provide employees with an internal resource to process critical incidents and decompress from cumulative stress. Peer support teams are composed of employee volunteers with specialized training in peer support and individual crisis management. Their primary responsibilities include pre-incident preparation and training, responding to critical incident scenes, providing a confidential forum for employees to decompress and process work-related stress, and disseminating resource information when needed.
This 2-day accredited course combines the construction of a peer support team model with cutting edge research on stress and trauma exposure that will enable organizations to institute a program tailored to the needs and challenges of the profession.