Developing Resilience in First Responders: Strategies for Enhancing Psychoeducational Service Delivery

• Published in: Psychological services 2022-01, Vol.19 (S2), p.17-27
• Main Authors: Crane, Monique F., Falon, Samantha L., Kho, Madison, Moss, Andrew, Adler, Amy B.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Best practice; First Responders; Health status; Human; Intervention; Mental Health; Military Training; Pandemics; Personnel Training; Pretraining; Psychoeducation; Psychological well being; Rescue workers; Resilience; Resilience (Psychological); Training; Traumatic life events; Well Being; Workplaces
• ISSN: 1541-1559; 1939-148X
• DOI: 10.1037/ser0000439

Large-scale potentially traumatic events (e.g., unprecedented fires and global pandemics) require the involvement of frontline staff critical to managing such crises. These personnel also carry the psychological burden associated with more direct exposure to potentially traumatic events. A critical role for resilience interventions is to support the psychological health of personnel during and after such events. However, there is a notable lack of a conceptual blueprint regarding how to approach the delivery of resilience interventions in the workplace. This article will draw from the current resilience training scholarship with the objective of providing a roadmap for both the enhancement and delivery of resilience training across sectors and future research into resilience interventions. Central to this article is the need for greater integration of organizational training theory into strategies for developing and implementing resilience training in the workplace. Following a brief review of the broad approaches to resilience training, we provide an account of how psychologists and other providers may maximize resilience training effectiveness, drawing on lessons learned from the military experience. Further, we give consideration to the intersection between resilience training and the organizational training scholarship and explore the factors that influence the effect of training on mental health outcomes, including pretraining conditions, training methods and instructional strategies, and posttraining conditions. An overarching challenge for this article is to support the development of a framework for best practice in resilience training that integrates organizational training theory.