Trauma Resilience in High Risk roles

Extensive qualitative research (i.e. focus groups, consultation and job shadowing) with SO15 & Counter-Terrorism, emergency call handling, online Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), covert surveillance and firearms units uncovers how individuals develop unique skills and coping mechanisms to process trauma exposure and provide recommendations for training, assessment and wellbeing support for those in similar high-risk roles.

Key findings include:

  • Making sense of trauma exposure in Call Handling is more to do with information processing and compassion management than situational awareness (as with processing live incidents attended in person). Learning to ‘let go’ of calls and needing to know what happened to cases is key to resilience. This may require more deliberate use of PfC areas of the brain to make decisions about information and to manage compassion and empathy. More recently, the impact of taking mental health crisis calls and delivering under the Right Care Right Person programme is also being investigated. 

  • In tactical operations in firearms, covert surveillance and Counter-Terrorism, the training given on the job for situational awareness and having a specific task to do in a live incident seems to have a protective effect against trauma impact. Situational awareness is good practice for hippocampal regions to help make sense of traumatic incidents and the proactive agency of task-oriented work likely activates PfC areas of the brain which are key to resilience. 

  • Child Sexual Exploitation and digital exposure are particularly challenging for trauma resilience and qualitative research revealed that practical management of work stations (such as using screen filters and being positioned near a window) can help the immediate impact of immersion in material. Notions of shame and collusion due to safeguarding responsibilities seemed to exacerbate trauma impact to unmanageable levels in many cases. 

For more information on specialist high-risk training please contact Dr Jess Miller  jkm35@cam.ac.uk