Planning for Critical Incidents Within an Organisational Setting
Social work is a professional activity long recognised for its complex and at times stressful engagement with challenging human problems. A growing awareness of the impact of stress, trauma, and critical incidents has seen a concomitant rise in organisational attention to staff support, with burgeoning research and practice activity in fields such as supervision, resilience, and response to critical incidents (Adamson, Beddoe, & Davys, 2012; Pack, 2013; Storey & Billingham, 2001; Wendt, Tuckey, & Prosser, 2011). For this chapter, a broad working definition of a critical incident is an event or situation within workplace settings or roles which have the potential to create a sense of emergency, crisis, and extreme stress, or have a traumatic impact on those directly or indirectly affected. Attention to the impact of critical incidents within the workplace, such as violence against social workers (Koritsas, Coles, & Boyle, 2010) and the risks of secondary or vicarious trauma (Bride, 2007; Cox & Steiner, 2013), has led to the embedding of workplace strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of sudden, potentially traumatic events. Evaluations of these strategies has resulted in debate over the most effective means of protecting social workers from critical incident stress and vicarious traumatisation. The focus of this chapter is a search for best practice evidence regarding the most effective means of establishing a robust system of critical incident support within an agency, of planning for the unpredictable, and of sustaining social workers in their desire to remain committed professionals with job satisfaction and healthy engagement with service-user communities.
The outline of the chapter is as follows: using the case example of Jo, a manager of a community social work agency, objectives are established for a literature search of current research knowledge regarding the provision of critical incident support. A search strategy is outlined and principles from current research extracted, with attention paid to the strands of the debate about critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) playing a role in highlighting the key factors for the design and embedding of critical incident response within a social work setting. The chapter now introduces Jo.