EMERGENCY PERSONNEL LEARN TO HANDLE STRESS

Emergency personnel from Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois converged on Southeast Missouri State University's Dempster Hall Wednesday while outside the Lifebeat helicopter, an ambulance, a fire truck and a police car sat waiting.

But it wasn't an emergency.

The emergency personnel -- including police officers, firefighters, emergency room nurses, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, mental-health professionals and pilots -- were there as part of a two-day seminar designed to train them to offer peer support during crisis situations.

Even the presence of the helicopter and other emergency vehicles were meant to assist in stress reduction by making emergency workers from different agencies familiar and comfortable with each other's jobs and vehicles.

"Stress is a normal reaction of normal, healthy people to abnormal events," said Deborah Oliver, the instructor for the seminar.

Oliver, a registered nurse and a reserve police officer with the Cape Girardeau Police Department, works as a specialist instructor for the Missouri Highway Patrol and the university's law enforcement academy. She is also a certified training instructor in critical incident stress management.

The type and level of stress experienced by emergency personnel is significantly different from the stress encountered by most people, Oliver said. Emergency personnel have to respond suddenly to emergency situations in which they are responsible for the lives of people and often have to make life-and-death decisions. It is not unusual for them to watch adults and children die and to deal with the grieving survivors.

Oliver emphasized that because of the training they receive most emergency personnel neither react negatively nor are impaired by the stress they experience on the job.

Occasionally, however, the cumulative effect of stress can weigh on the worker to the point that it is difficult for them to function.

"Stress affects people emotionally, physically and behaviorally," Oliver said.

She compared stress to the effect of alcohol on the brain. Like alcohol, stress can impair judgment, then motor skills and finally the physical well-being of the individual.

Critical incident stress management team members are trained to recognize the signs and respond to stressful situations in which emergency workers have become impaired.

"It's not psychotherapy but more like emotional first aid," Oliver said.

She compared the job of those who were trained Tuesday and Wednesday to a paramedic arriving at the scene of an accident and finding a person bleeding profusely. The job of the paramedic is not to perform surgery but to tie off the bleeder and get the person where he needs to be. The job of those who were trained this week is to defuse the stress and get the person where he needs to be.

The seminar, the third of its kind in the state, was sponsored by the Critical Incident Stress Management Network, Southeast Missouri Hospital, St. Francis Medical Center and Southeast Missouri State University.