Peer Support Program
Peer Support Programmes (PSP) are used widely in the US, Australia and UK. In 1996, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited the need for peer support programmes in their guidelines for preventing violence in health care and social service agencies. Public hospitals in Singapore have established PSPs since 2009. Organisations with PSPs acknowledge that employees may experience traumatic crisis as a result of workplace critical incidents and that these employee victims are worthy of compassionate care. PSPs are established on the understanding that talking about the event will lessen suffering, allow more effective coping in the short-term and will avoid long-lasting disruptions, including untreated PTSD.
A PSP provides an organizational framework for employees trained in crisis intervention to provide basic peer support and first line intervention to their colleagues. This is a voluntary, systems-wide, peer-help, crisis intervention to assist employee victims in dealing with the psychological aftermath of work-related critical incidents or crises. It provides a range of crisis interventions for individual, groups and employee family needs. These trained employees can provide on-going support in the days after traumatic incidents as well as emotional support on a day to day basis. TRaCS can help companies who are interested in developing in-house crisis teams to set up their own individual peer support program as well as provide follow up trainings to ensure currency of skills of trained employees.