Two years ago, Kansas City Police Captain Darren Ivey had never heard of secondary trauma. But he could see how the relentless stress of police work chewed away at the personal lives of officers.
“What I started seeing was…how many department members had attempted suicide, how many domestic violence calls we responded to on our own people, how many DUI calls,” he said. “We’ve been told to suck it up, and it’s killing us.”
That’s why Ivey was eager to work with members of his own department, Truman Medical Center, and Trauma Matters Kansas City (TMKC) to develop a training on trauma and resilience for first responders. Ivey now sits on the Steering Committee for Resilient KC, a partnership between TMKC and the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce that aims to build a healthy and resilient community.
Marsha Morgan, then chief operating officer of the Medical Center’s Department of Behavioral Health, said it helped that leaders of the TMKC network had already built relationships with Ivey and other officers through work with the police department’s crisis intervention teams.
“It became clear that if we didn’t take care of the people who were taking care of people, we were missing a whole piece,” she said.
From the start, organizers of the training—which, in its development, grew from a scant hour to a half-day session—were deliberate about the language they used. “‘Resilience’ is a word the Army uses,” Morgan said. “The message isn’t, ‘you’re weak,’ but ‘we’re going to make you stronger.’”
[For more of this story, written by Andee Hochman, go to http://marc.healthfederation.o...secondary-trauma-and]
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