Knowing the difference between a crisis and a critical incident means you can seek the right support at the right time for you and your colleagues. Caraniche at Work provides Critical Incident Support and Crisis Support. Here’s why it’s important to know the difference.

What is a Critical Incident?

Critical Incidents in the workplace take many forms. They may include a workplace accident, sudden death or injury, unforeseen staff redundancies or natural disasters such as floods or bushfire.

In response – employees can suffer from stress, fatigue, withdrawal, absenteeism or job uncertainty.

As recognised experts in Critical Incident Response (CIR), Caraniche at Work provides a CIR service by accredited CIR Practitioners, which can be delivered over the phone or face to face, to an individual or group.

Our CIR practitioners will work with you to assess what you need at the time.

Critical Incident Response interventions can include:

• Psychological First-Aid – we provide support to management in dealing with a critical incident, helping to stabilise the situation, re-establish control and return the workplace to a level of normality.
• Critical Incident Stress Defusing – we help to defuse and stabilise employee responses, by addressing the immediate stress responses of those directly affected by the incident and giving them an opportunity to feel psychologically contained.
• Critical Incident Stress Debriefing – we provide structured discussion to put an abnormal event into perspective, focusing on the ‘facts’ of the incident, people’s reactions to the situation and providing information or education on managing responses to the incident.
• Stress Stocktakes – we support workplaces addressing cumulative stress effects, particularly when an individual or team has been exposed to ongoing difficult situations. This might be responding to difficult emergency response calls, behaviour from staff or members of the community, or conflict between other parties.

What is Crisis Support?

Occasionally employees contact our EAP service in extreme distress or crisis. In these circumstances Caraniche at Work recognises the need to provide prompt, trauma-informed support and provides a 24/7 telephone-based service, 365 days of the year.

This service is not intended as a crisis line. Our triage process is that a call to the 1800 number will be either answered immediately, or if we are assisting other callers, directed to voicemail, with a guaranteed call back within the hour.

This ensures rapid assessment of safety risks, containment of the emotional distress, identification of issues and initial treatment planning. Where the caller is assessed as very high risk, a safety plan will be implemented.

If required, the CATT team, ambulance or police will be contacted to assist the caller. Where risk is lower, family members or other supports will be engaged. Where appropriate, employees will be followed up the following day to allocate to ongoing EAP support.

Next steps

Should you ever need to access the Caraniche at Work Critical Incident Response service or Crisis Support please contact 1800 099 444.