Psychological First Aid & Stress Injury
With the help of respondersalliance.org and the amazing work of Laura McGladrey, we hope to provide you with resources and tools to help you and your backcountry partners understand and approach the challenges and stress injuries that an avalanche can instill.
Stress Continuum
The continuum can be used as a self-assessment tool, in order to provide those affected by a single incident such as an avalanche accident, or cumulative stress, to detect early and late changing reactions caused by overwhelming stress. Also used as a communication tool, expanding on the universal “I’m fine,” to more precise expression of stress impact and simpler means of communicating with each other.
Psychological First Aid
The goal of psychological first aid is to hopefully mitigate the development of life altering stress injuries, ie PTSD.
The 3-3-3 Exposure Plan: 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 Months
The impacts of traumatic stress and loss outlast the rush of support that often occurs following an incident. Following a traumatic exposure, a source for stress injuries can go unidentified and therefore not addressed. The 3-3-3 is a self evaluation tool that allows for pre-planning for the predictably unexpected exposures that rescuers and teams face, as well as a system for consistent assessment of occupational readiness. The 3-3-3 protocol consists of embedded evidence guided actions for mitigation, PFA (Psychological First Aid), and monitoring, TSQ (Trauma Screening Questionnaire).