Nicole Sadler: Psychological First Aid is based on principles that have been drawn from years of research, field experience and expert consensus on how best to support people after exposure to a trauma.
A wide variety of people with basic training and interpersonal skills can deliver PFA.
It’s not formal assessment or a therapy process. and it is also not pressuring people to tell you about their feelings or reactions to an event.
PFA aims to do no harm and to provide practical and emotional support that is aligned with the needs and preferences of the individual as well as their cultural and spiritual backgrounds.
PFA sits within a stepped care approach, as a low level intervention. Stepped care is a widely used and public health approach that recognises that the level of mental health support should be matched to the individual’s needs.
Therefore, when providing PFA you may identify that the individual needs to be stepped up, into the next level of mental health support and so you link them with their GP or a specialist mental health service.
There are 5 key principles of PFA: a sense of safety, calming, a sense of self and community efficacy, connectedness and hope.
When providing PFA its important to keep each of these principles in mind. As a PFA provider you should firstly aim to reintroduce a sense of safety, as this has been shown to reduce negative reactions over time.
Safety here refers to both physical and psychological safety.
Psychological safety refers to protecting people from situations that may cause them further distress, such as seeing terrible things on the news or in person, receiving bad news in an insensitive or uncontrolled way, or even being approached by the media.
In some settings promoting safety will involve helping people put in place their own strategies to prevent further exposure to these stresses.
As a PFA provider you may also support their physical safety by guiding them away from any ongoing threat and helping them meet basic needs such as accessing water, food and shelter or helping them obtain emergency medical attention.
Secondly, we are aiming to promote calm as we know it is normal for people to experience a wide range of strong emotions after a trauma.
This principle refers to helping people cope with strong emotions as well as creating a calm environment for the impacted person , workplace or community.
For example, you may use simple psychological strategies such as controlled breathing to help individuals cope better with any strong emotional reactions.
Further, calming may involve creating a sense of order and organisation in crisis settings. Such as creating quiet spaces for highly distressed people, or safe areas for children separated from their loved ones.
Thirdly, we seek to promote a sense of self and community efficacy. This is about helping people to have a sense of control over positive outcomes by encouraging people to see a link between the actions they take, either as an individual or as a community and positive outcomes. This principle highlights that people, teams and communities bring with them, many existing strengths and resources and they are best placed to determine what is best for their situation.
It may be simply a matter of reminding people of their own abilities or you might help them to determine access for resources they are missing so that they can take positive actions to support their own recovery.
The fourth principle is connectedness, which is critical to recovery from trauma. Social connections help people to solve practical problems through information sharing, helping with daily tasks as well as to gain emotional understanding and acceptance of what has happened.
As a PFA provider you might support connection by ensuring families are kept together, helping people contact loved ones or linking them with relevant services.
And finally, instilling hope. Most of us are unprepared for a very traumatic event and it can lead to people no longer seeing the world as a safe or predictable place, as they did before the trauma. This can lead to a sense of hopelessness and people can even give up trying.
As a PFA provider we can help instil hope by helping individuals to understand that their reactions are common and conveying an expectation that people can recover from trauma. And you can support people to take one step at a time and to notice small gains so that they can begin to look forward.
Using these 5 PFA principles will look different in every situation. But as an example, if you were asked to support a distressed team member after a critical incident, you might apply the principles by – guiding them away from the media to a calm and private environment. After helping them calm their breathing, and reassuring them that their reactions are normal, you ask them what they need right now. If they say they want to call a loved one and figure out a way to finish their shift and get home safely, you help them do both these things and ask if its okay to check in with them the next day.
When you learn how to apply these PFA principles you’ll be able to provide the most effective response to people who need your help, whilst also taking care of yourself.