Core Module:  
​Identifying and Responding to Distress

What is the First Response IRD Programme?
First Response IRD module is a psychological well-being and support programme for both individuals and organisations.  It consists of  core skills that focus on identifying and responding to people in distress.  This core module will equip you or your staff with the skills you need to identify and respond effectively to people who are showing signs of distress. Encountering someone in distress can be challenging and scary when you don’t know what to do.  If you’re working in a role that has high levels of contact with, or responsibility for people, being able to identify their signals of distress, respond appropriately, identify resources, and know who to refer them to, will give you the confidence to provide better quality and timely support.  These skills are essential to the maintenance of a healthy and safe workplace.  During the module help-seeking pathways will be clearly delineated and you will learn transferable skills that you can also use in your personal life, such as self-awareness, self-care, communication skills and how to maintain boundaries.
 
Who is the IRD programme suitable for?
The core module is suitable for the training of front line staff, lecturers, managers, department heads, or people with human resource, pastoral care, health, youth or disability support roles.
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We aim to enable participants in our programme to:

• Identify the signals of distress
• Respond appropriately
• Provide resources
• Refer to professionals
• Maintain boundaries and attend to their own self-care

 
Please note that the module does not enable people to make diagnoses of psychological conditions or to provide treatment.  However, it does provide practical pointers that will allow you to assess urgency and refer to an appropriately qualified health professional or service.
 
What does the IRD module consist of?
The module consists of three parts:

• Information: Pre-reading of the resource book (approximately five hours  of reading -  provided two weeks prior to the training day)
• Skills-based training:  practical workshop (eight hours of face-to-face training)
• Integration: Experiential period to give you time to practise new skills and identify areas for improvement (The ‘Integration’ phase can vary in length depending on your opportunity to engage in situations with people who are distressed).

The resource book contains background material that you will need to read before your eight hour skills-based workshop.  The workshop is designed to reinforce and expand on the knowledge-base included in the resource book, through learning practical skills, discussion and the exploration of some of the more complex situations you may encounter.

Following the workshop you will be required to put into practice the skills you’ve learnt and to reflect on your strengths and limitations. This will help you to identify what else you may need to do to improve and gain confidence in the future.  You will be asked to write up this experiential part of the programme in a workbook that that we will assess. On satisfactory completion of this, we will provide you with a certificate of completion for the module.  This equates to 20 hours of learning, including the initial reading of the resource book and the workshop.

Strengths of the IRD programme

Responsive and interactive

Our intervention involves the following stages, which have been organised into The Four R’s of Recognition, Response, Resource and Referral.

The training day involves interactive, experiential learning focusing on practising core skills. The day includes a self-care component to ensure that participants attend to their own psychological health. Face-to-face training time is limited to a day by efficiently incorporating ‘information-giving’ into required pre-reading. The day is followed by the consolidation of skills in the workplace.

Peer intervention

While one of the aims of the programme is to assist front line managers to support their staff and customers/clients, it is also important that staff learn how to support each other. There is good evidence to show that peer intervention programmes change knowledge, attitudes and behaviours in a variety of workplace settings. Benefits to trained helpers several months post-training include greater confidence in providing help to others, greater likelihood of advising people to seek professional help, and improvements in their own mental health.  Alongside increased knowledge, trained helpers also show a reduction in stigmatising attitudes such as decreasing their social distance from people with mental disorders and the degree to which they view mental illness as a sign of personal weakness.   

Assessed engagement

Following the skills-training there is an ‘integration’ component of the programme, after which all participants are assessed before being issued with a completion certificate. Rather than assessing participants’ ability to recall content, the First Response programme assesses their ability to put theory into practice by applying their learning, reflecting on their experiences, strengths and limitations, and identifying their on-going learning needs to improve and gain confidence in the future.

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