By Zane Sheeran and Anna Sutton
Working in policing can be hazardous, stressful and emotionally demanding. Across the world, officers regularly attend critical incidents and can even be faced with physical threats to their lives. These incidents have significant short and long term effects on their work lives. And unfortunately, emergency workers such as police officers are often left to fend for themselves, lacking appropriate resources to support themselves. As a result they often struggle to return to work safely and confidently.
My recent paper reviewed the literature surrounding return-to-work programmes, with the hopes of identifying how much the effect of critical incidents on officers' work performance is being considered in research, as well as looking forward to see how this topic could be approached by future researchers.
Critical incidents are managed in three ways: Primary interventions focus on reducing the risk of being exposed to a critical incident (this can be hard to do in policing), secondary interventions aim to build resilience or other personal resources to buffer against the effects of exposure to a critical incident and tertiary interventions are treatments that aim to regenerate officers after being exposed to a critical incident - they can be expert or peer led.
We found although there is an abundance of studies focusing on stress and well-being outcomes (such as reducing PTSD) across all intervention types, there is a lack of research into how critical incidents and their interventions influence work performance, attitudes or experiences. This may be due to the medicalisation of these events, where the focus is on treating symptoms rather than considering effective work performance, and certainly most interventions tended to be led by experts. Yet we also found that people report peer support to be important in their recovery: future research in this area could help identify what support peers can offer and how they help those experiencing critical incidents to return to work effectively.