Capt. Tim Vander Roest of the volunteer Lacombe Fire Department has seen his share of tragedy on the highways.
For three days last week, he participated in a critical incident stress management training course to sharpen his skills to help those cope who witness the same snapshot.
“Our guys are seeing more and more fairly nasty car accidents,” said Vander Roest.
“And we’re doing more medical responses within our community so we just wanted to be better aware of how to identify what causes them stress and how I can help out in anyway.”
Vander Roest said incidents like car accidents and other critical events are on the rise so they need to prepare.
In the course he strengthened his tools to help defuse situations in his crews and help them deal with what they have seen.
“Part of our fire department (territory) takes up Highway 12 and a section of the QEII Highway so we see a lot of bad car wrecks,” he said.
“We can never really be sure if we will be fully prepared but better prepared obviously is the way we would like to go into every incident.
“The frequency of them seem to be escalating so we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that yeah it’s not going to end tomorrow.”
Vander Roest was one of 52 individuals who participated in the training course designed for those who help others form peer support or advocate organizations, and those in a workplace tasked with helping their colleagues or the public after critical incidents. This could be a fatal car crash, a suicide or even a hostage-taking.
“It’s something historically not much attention has been paid to in any of these fields,” said Critical Incident Stress Management instructor Steve Dongworth, a professional firefighter for 35 years in the United Kingdom and Canada.
“Whether it is emergency response or the community or whatever. I think there’s a growing demand from an expectation from the public and employees of organizations that these services are available to them after bad things happen. Unfortunately in life, bad things happen fairly often.”
Employees tend to either get sick or leave their job because they are not well when organizations do not deal with its problems after critical events, he said.
In his course, he taught the participants how to deal with groups and individuals after traumatic incidents.
“Whether we are members of the community or members of organizations, we are all human beings,” said Dongworth.
“After bad events perhaps we don’t feel so good about that, and there are some really simple things we can do to help us get over that. I think it’s really important for people to know that.”
Organized by Victim Services, Red Deer Rural Detachment, the course ran from Thursday to Saturday at the Crossroads Church.
Participants received a certificate in Individual Crisis Intervention and in Group Crisis Intervention.
Another course is scheduled for Sept. 22, 23 and 24. Contact Gloria Derksen, executive director of Victim Services, Red Deer Rural Detachment, for more information at gloria.derksen@rcmp-grc.gc.ca
crhyno@www.reddeeradvocate.com