Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #109975

Jay Segal, PhD¹, Jerry H. Ratcliffe, PhD², Sarah J. Powell, MA¹, and Diana Kaufman, BS¹. (1) Public Health Department, Temple University, 304 Vivacqua Hall, P.O. Box 2843, 1700 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, 215-204-5107, jay096@aol.com, (2) Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, Gladfelter Hall (Rm 527), 1115 W Berks Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, local and state law enforcement has become more active in the area of counterterrorism, previously the sole domain of federal law enforcement. The Philadelphia Police Department has responded by creating a Major Incident Response Team (MIRT), which has a current strength of 350 officers and will eventually include 500 officers. The current police MIRT advisory team has crafted a comprehensive five day training program for all major incident first responders emphasizing a variety of recommendations outlined by the federal and local governmental agencies. Our research team has contributed by providing a comprehensive “best practice” training tool to address the critical issue of emotional preparation and stress management for officers who may be responding to biological and radiological emergencies and major incidents. Through working closely with MIRT administrators and police training teams, the training module aims to fill gaps in officer disaster training in compliance with the overall MIRT mission. Evaluation tools include a cross sectional survey and a pre-post control group assessment, utilizing delayed treatment as our comparison group, which will assess subject's self-efficacy, stress susceptibility, resiliency, and other dependant measures that may affect the long term coping capability of MIRT participants. The final evaluation component assesses the 10 hour crisis and stress management training in relation to officer behavior and decision-making regarding their perceptions of future participation. Overall, this training component contributes to model program development for behavioral health disaster preparedness and could be widely disseminated as major incident response core curricula.

Learning Objectives:

• • Recognize the importance of stress management techniques in emergency preparedness training for first responders, including police officers.
• • Identify 5 outcomes of mental health preparedness as a result of adding a mental health component to current Major Incident Response Team (MIRT) training.
• • Apply ideas, concepts, methodologies for prevention of PTSD to existing public health educational strategies for first responders.

Keywords: Stress, Training

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.