With the support of our NHS Charity, the Staff Psychology Service, led by Dr Rebecca Yeates, is launching a new peer-support Critical Stress Incident Management (CISM) debriefing service, and is recruiting up to 12 colleagues to join our cohort of peer-support debriefers.

Ahead of the service launch in February, our debriefers will receive five days of training in January from Professor Stephen Regel, a leading UK trauma specialist and founder of the Nottingham Trauma Centre.

Rebecca is a Clinical Psychologist, and the Service Lead for CHFT’s Staff Psychology Service, as well as a Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of Leeds.

Rebecca said: “Potentially traumatic critical clinical incidents, such as unexpected patient deaths, can have a significant psychological impact on colleagues. Debriefing can form an important part of post-incident support. CISM debriefs aim to explore the impact of the incident, ways of coping and future planning, which can help colleagues feel heard and supported which can aid their recovery process and overall wellbeing.

“Choosing to be a debriefer will offer significant benefits to the wider workforce. By increasing the cohort of available debriefers, we will improve colleagues’ overall access to debriefing which may have important implications for colleague wellbeing, turnover and retention following critical incidents. For the debriefers themselves, the CISM training is comprehensive, so we believe it will provide trainees with a valuable professional development opportunity.”

To find out more about critical incident peer-support debriefing please read this interactive document. On the last page there is a link to an expression of interest form. If you are interested in becoming a debrief facilitator, we ask that you express your interest no later than Thursday 30th November 2023.

And if you know a colleague who you think would benefit, please show them this article.

More about the our Staff Psychology Service

The Staff Psychology is a new service which aims to provide individual staff members and whole teams with access to brief psychological assessment and consultation to support CHFT and its people to maintain healthy and effective employment. The focus and remit of the service is to support colleagues whose mental health difficulties are either triggered or maintained by workplace events.