Stress First Aid for Health Care Professionals 7 steps to Recognize and Respond Early to Stress Injuries

AMA has developed an excellent resource for busy physicians. AMA STEPS Forward® offers a collection of engaging and interactive educational toolkits that are practical, actionable “how-to” guides to transform and improve your practice.

Please visit their website at https://edhub.ama-assn.org/steps-forward

Stress First Aid (SFA) is a framework for peer support and self-care for health care professionals. The SFA framework is parallel to how a clinician or first-responder approaches physical first aid. 

  1. Check Increased awareness about stress reactions in yourself and your coworkers in an ongoing way. Check for danger signs in yourself or others after or during an adverse event. 
  2. Coordinate: Get any additional information and assistance that might be needed. Provide referrals and national crisis lines number. Remember the new national suicide and crisis hotline number 988
  3. Cover: Ensure ongoing safety. Stay with the person. 
  4. Calm: Calm action in SFA is to reduce the intensity of physiological, emotional, and behavioral stress. Relax, slow down and focus
  5. Connect: restoring or increasing social support, such as asking for or providing social and clinical support. 
  6. Competence: fostering and restoring a stress-affected person’s capacity to function in all their important life roles, including occupational, personal, and social domains.
  7. Confidence: Confidence action involves promoting realistic hope and building self-esteem that may have been damaged or lost due to stress, promoting confidence in core values and beliefs, or bolstering pride and commitment. The concepts of resilience, wisdom, and post-traumatic growth are grounded in the actions of reflection and a renewed faith in oneself. Trusted peers and leaders play a significant role in supporting someone with a stress injury which has experienced a loss of confidence.

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