Reactions of Police Officers to Body-Handling after a Major Disaster a Before-and-After Comparison

Abstract

This study reports the results of an unusual opportunity to follow up a group of police officers who were involved in body-handling duties following the Piper Alpha disaster, and for whom there were available data from pre-disaster assessments. In addition, after these duties, the officers were compared with a matched control group of officers who had not been involved in such work. The comparisons failed to demonstrate high levels of post-traumatic distress or psychiatric morbidity. The results are interpreted in terms of issues such as the officers' own coping strategies, and major organisational and managerial factors.

Levels of Death Anxiety, Death Related Depression of Health Personnel Providing Emergency Medical Services and Their Coping Methods

“…Acil durum çalışanlarında görülen travmatik stres ve yaygınlığı konusunda, itfaiye çalışanları, [1][2][3] ruh sağlığı uzmanları, [4,5] polisler, [6][7][8] hekimler [9] ve arama-kurtarma çalışanları ile yapılmış olan çok sayıda araştırma [10][11][12][13][14][15] bulunmaktadır.…”

Organisational psychosocial hazard exposures in UK policing

“…Symonds (1970) first drew this distinction in his model of the emotional hazards of police work that has guided much subsequent research and, in the UK policing context, resulted in the development of two parallel but disproportionate literatures. In the intervening decades numerous studies have explored UK police officers' exposure to operational stressors, especially exposure to traumatic critical incidents (e.g., Alexander and Wells, 1991;Brown and Fielding, 1993;Brown, Fielding, and Grover, 1999;Mitchell-Gibbs and Joseph, 1996), while fewer have focused on OPH exposures (e.g., Alexander, et al, 1993;Biggam et al, 1997;Brown and Campbell, 1990;Kirkcaldy, 1996, 1999;Brown and Fielding, 1993;Collins and Gibb, 2003;Cooper, Davidson, and Robinson, 1982;Kirkcaldy, et al, 1993).…”

“…Symonds (1970) first drew this distinction in his model of the emotional hazards of police work that has guided much subsequent research and, in the UK policing context, resulted in the development of two parallel but disproportionate literatures. In the intervening decades numerous studies have explored UK police officers' exposure to operational stressors, especially exposure to traumatic critical incidents (e.g., Alexander and Wells, 1991;Brown and Fielding, 1993;Brown, Fielding, and Grover, 1999;Mitchell-Gibbs and Joseph, 1996), while fewer have focused on OPH exposures (e.g., Alexander, et al, 1993;Biggam et al, 1997;Brown and Campbell, 1990; Kirkcaldy, 1996, 1999;Brown and Fielding, 1993;Collins and Gibb, 2003;Cooper, Davidson, and Robinson, 1982;Kirkcaldy, et al, 1993).The relative paucity of research concerning UK police officers' OPH exposures is surprising given the UK-and officer-specific evidence to suggest that OPHs (a) are reported more often than operational psychosocial hazards -by a ratio of 4 to 1 (Brown and Campbell, 1990), (b) are perceived as more stressful than operational psychosocial hazards, and (c) may have an equal or even greater influence on UK police officers' health than exposure to 5 traumatic operational stressors (Biggam et al, 1997) and routine operational stressors (Alexander, et al, 1993; Collins and Gibbs, 2003). These findings do not appear to be peculiar to the UK; studies in Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the USA have produced similar results (Brough, 2004;Kop, Euwema, and Schaufeli, 1999;Shane, 2010;Taylor and Bennell, 2006).…”

The influence of a disaster on the health of rescue workers: a longitudinal study

“…25,26 Perhaps the greatest advantage of sick-leave records, particularly in countries where the information is collected routinely, is that predisaster health information is available. 29,41 Moreover, the demographic and occupational information in these databases facilitates the investigation of risk factors for and occupational differences in postdisaster health sequelae.…”

“…21,22 In some countries, however, health information is routinely recorded in general practice, in hospitals and by occupational health services; this policy allows researchers to collect health data pre-and postdisaster and to validate whether the event directly affected the health of victims and rescue workers. [22][23][24][25][26] Predisaster health information has previously been used to examine the effect of a disaster on the health of rescue workers in 2 studies: in Oklahoma 14 and the Netherlands, 25 respectively. To investigate how a disaster affected the health of rescue workers, we made use of information on absences from work attributable to health problems (i.e., sickness absences or sick leave).…”