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Supporting the Mental Health and Well-being of Members of a Specialised Area of an Australian Law Enforcement Organisation

Tracks
Ballroom 1 and Virtual via OnAIR
Monday, March 4, 2024
1:45 PM - 2:15 PM
Ballroom 1

Overview

Prue Laurence, Converge International


Speaker

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Prue Laurence
Director, SafeSelect
Converge International

Supporting the Mental Health and Well-being of Members of a Specialised Area of an Australian Law Enforcement Organisation

Abstract

A Law Enforcement Agency wanted to assess the mental health and well-being of employees from an elite specialist subgroup. These employees are required to provide rapid response assistance to high-risk situations that pose a threat to the public safety. These situations involve heightened emotions, threat of violence, potential use of force and risks to the safety of themselves and others. Due to these risks, the organisation identified Wellbeing Assessments as essential to maintaining the mental health wellbeing and performance of employees. We have partnered with this organisation since 2018 in the provision of wellbeing assessments. We conducted a longitudinal analysis of 65 Wellbeing Assessments (2018 – present) to identify the psychological risks most evident in the group year on year and examined the improvement of the mental health of the team following the implementation of wellbeing initiatives and operational enhancements. Our Wellbeing Assessments involve a personality assessment and a semi-structured clinical interview with a Converge Psychologist. Our analysis identified that almost half of the individuals assessed between 2018-2023 (ongoing) are experiencing difficulties related to their mental health and wellbeing. The data indicates that it is likely many of these difficulties have arisen due to the emotional and physical demands of the role. Specifically, team members had risks in terms of anger management, characteristics of depression and anxiety, engaging in coping behaviours such as alcohol use and gambling, as well as risks that could impact their ability to work as part of a team. Additionally, the role requirements such as shift work and being on call makes it difficult for team members to “switch off”, impacts relationships in their personal life and sleep disturbances. Based on these findings we implemented psychological first aid, a sleep awareness program to improve the sleep quality of team members and family support counselling. We recommended the organisation create a post-operational acknowledgement program to provide recognition of team and individual efforts after extremely difficult operations and a secondment program to allow members to take a short career break from the unit. These wellbeing and operational recommendations have shown to reduce the level of psychological risk experienced by unit members as well as key improvements in lifestyle factors such as family relationships, physical health and substance abuse.

Biography

Prue Laurence is an organisational and forensic psychologist who brings over 25 years’ experience in psychological and psychometric assessment. She is the Director of SafeSelect at Converge and is well respected for her assessment knowledge and the capacity to apply this to differing Customer needs. Specialising in risk assessment for emergency management and public safety organisations, Prue has spent the last 7 years honing her understanding of this industry. She is a contributing author of the Risk Prediction Index (RPI) the risk assessment used by Converge and has deep knowledge and experience of most other behavioural assessments available on the market.

Host

Mel Stewart
Director
AST Management


Moderator

Shinade Hartman
AST Management

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Justine White
Event Manager
AST Management


Session Chair

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Buck Reed
Lecturer in Paramedicine
Charles Sturt University

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