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.
- 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.
- 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
- Cover: Ensure ongoing safety. Stay with the person.
- Calm: Calm action in SFA is to reduce the intensity of physiological, emotional, and behavioral stress. Relax, slow down and focus
- Connect: restoring or increasing social support, such as asking for or providing social and clinical support.
- Competence: fostering and restoring a stress-affected person’s capacity to function in all their important life roles, including occupational, personal, and social domains.
- 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.