Better together: Clinicians and firefighters

By: Robert Avsec, FSPA Operations Chief

The following was posted over on LinkedIn by a colleague, Dr. Kat Aguilera, a psychologist, trauma specialist, and military and frontline support in the UK. She’s also the founder of Resilience Rises.

“Kat, do you experience any intrusions from your work?”

I was mid-training with a police force’s high-risk units last week – crime scene investigation, digital forensics, safeguarding, family liaison. The question came from one of the officers and the room went quiet. They needed to know if it’s normal.

“Sometimes, yes” I said.

That’s when it opened up. Other officers sharing their experiences, asking, “Is this normal?”

Of course it’s normal, I told them. We work in jobs where we’re exposed to the worst of what people do to each other, it’s going to pop in at times. That’s processing at work.

But here’s what’s not normal: expecting that chronic exposure won’t get to you from time to time, then having zero process to identify the risk when it does.

That’s what we were doing in that room. Giving them the warning signs, the flags to watch out for that can help differentiate between normal exposure and compounding buildup. We can normalise the exposure, but let’s not normalise the breakdown.

That room proved what I already know: they’re not asking for resilience training, they already have that in spades. They’re asking for honesty and tools that are preventative rather than reactive.

This is what early intervention is about.

It’s having the honest conversations, and then providing the tools to catch the risk before it compounds into something catastrophic.

That’s it from Kat. So, what are your experiences working directly with fire and EMS personnel in “their environment?”