Stress First Aid for Healthcare Workers: A Peer Support Tool

Overview

Class Central Tips

Stress First Aid (SFA) is a peer support toolkit designed to preserve life, prevent further harm, and promote recovery. Stress First Aid offers a flexible menu of options for recognizing and addressing stress reactions. It can be used for self-care, to help co-workers with stress reactions, or to help someone seek other types of support. Stress First Aid is a framework of practical actions that can help reduce the likelihood that stress reactions will develop into more severe or long-term problems. Ideally everyone in an organization would learn the vocabulary and basics of Stress First Aid, to share a language and understanding of stress and stress injury. When everyone in an organization is trained in SFA, support could occur wherever and whenever it’s needed.

Syllabus

Introduction to Stress and Stress Injury

In the first week of "Stress First Aid for Healthcare Workers," we'll lay the foundation for understanding stress and stress injury. We’ll discuss the unique stressors that healthcare professionals face in their daily practice and gain crucial insights to recognize early signs of stress injury. By the end of this week, you'll have the vocabulary to discuss stress within the context of the Stress First Aid peer support model.

Stress First Aid Peer Support Model

In the second week of "Stress First Aid for Healthcare Workers", we will link the stress first aid model to both the stress continuum and four sources of orange zone stress providing learners with a framework from which to assess when stress first aid is needed. We will deconstruct the stress first aid model emphasizing Continuous, Primary, and Secondary Aid strategies linking them to a set of actionable behaviors designed to preserve life, prevent further harm, and promote recovery. Upon completion of Week 2 content, participants will gain a greater appreciation for why stress first aid is optimally delivered by peers because peers have already acquired the necessary context to care for those around them in the workspace.

Well-Being and Health Promotions

This week, you will focus on methods that will encourage growth within the green zone of the Stress Continuum. While we’ve talked about Stress First Aid mostly in relation to when individuals are facing a crisis (orange or red zone), it is also important for us to recognize that it’s important to recognize opportunities for wellness and resilience-based practices. As we move toward the final week of the course, we’ll also consider what we need to understand about ourselves as caregivers of Stress First Aid.

Stress First Aid Application

This week you will apply the content learned from weeks 1, 2 and 3 through case study application. Through case studies, you will be challenged to apply Continuous, Primary and Secondary Aid strategies through the prism of the stress continuum. Additionally, we will provide additional guidance around the value of performing your own community resource list so that you will be best prepared to support peers wherever they may fall along the Stress Continuum.