Webinar - Psychological First Aid: Top ten tips

Psychological First Aid: Top ten tips

Presented by SickKids CCMH Learning Institute

Live webinar: November 25, 2021 | Time: 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Facilitator: Michel Jones, MSW, RSW, RP

With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, many health-care workers and first responders are faced with people who are experiencing increased mental health issues as well as physical issues. The pandemic’s psychological ripple effects are different from those of natural disasters, which last merely hours or days. The pandemic is like a never-ending story. What makes this story more psychologically toxic is that we keep receiving new blows as resurgences, new variants, and new outbreaks occur, doing more collateral damage to life and work.

This training has been developed to assist professionals in offering basic mental health support to those individuals. Offering tips on how to approach people who may be anxious, depressed, and afraid, we will look at real-life case studies about how people respond positively to basic mental health care.

Like regular first aid, Psychological First Aid (PFA) is a way of helping someone in pain — except rather than cleaning and bandaging a cut or applying ice to a sprained ankle, PFA tends to someone’s anxiety or distress in a way that will ease it and help restore that person’s sense of equanimity. While not trying to take the place of traditional therapy, this approach is designed to support a person’s emotional distress in the moment. This is an interactive workshop and participants are encouraged to bring case studies or professional situations of their own to discuss with the group.

The world seems more uncertain than ever. On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis we’re subjected to bad news from multiple directions — not just about the pandemic, the economy and racial issues, but about political scandals, civic tensions, fires, floods, conspiracy theories and more — without the in-person support of friends, extended family and colleagues because of the pandemic.

Learning objectives:

• discover ways to bring down psychological distress in the moment and strategies to help the client better manage their emotions going forward
• learn ways to calm the body, the emotions and the distorted cognitions that may be driving a client's psychological anguish
• be able help clients identify ways to keep safe and grounded in the face of toxic uncertainty of living with COVID-19

Registration fees: $165. Student and group rate available

For full registration details please visit: https://cvent.me/NxRg2B

Continuing Education hours (CE): 3

SickKids CCMH Learning Institute has approval from the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) for participants of our programming to apply the number of CE hours earned in the program towards their continuing education hours. Full-day programs equal six CE hours; half-day programs equal three CE hours; for less than half-day programs, one hour of programming equals one CE hour.

Other licensing boards and professional organizations will grant continuing education credits for attendance at their own discretion; participants will need to submit the course outline and certificate for their consideration.

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