OBJECTIVE Crisis intervention team (CIT) training provides police officers with knowledge and skills to improve their responses to individuals with mental illnesses. This study determined changes in knowledge, attitudes, and social distance related to schizophrenia among police officers after CIT training. METHODS A survey was administered to 159 officers immediately before and after a 40-hou...

This column discusses ways that states can implement community-based best practices statewide, by using the crisis intervention team (CIT) model as an example. Although state mental health authorities may want to use a top-down approach to ensure uniform, high-quality implementation, programs may be more likely to succeed if they arise as bottom-up, grassroots innovations. Programs like CIT are...

Pastoral crisis intervention may be thought of as the functional integration of crisis intervention and pastoral support. In effect, the practice of pastoral crisis intervention largely represents the use of faith-based interventions refined and augmented through the use of an emergency mental health delivery context. The value of pastoral crisis intervention seems apparent in situations involv...

This article explores the work of a rapid response team (RRT) in an English city. The RRT is a multiprofessional intermediate care team that is able to support patients to remain at home during clinical crises and changes to their social care needs. The service is popular with patients and cost effective. The National Audit of Intermediate Care is in its fourth year and benchmarks how intermedi...

BACKGROUND In the context of crisis and disasters, school-aged children are a vulnerable group with fewer coping resources than adults. The school is a key arena for preventive interventions; teachers can be given a key role in large-scale school-based interventions following a man-made or natural disaster. OBJECTIVES This paper describes a practical example of designing a school-based popula...

The paper describes how ethics consultation can be valuable to health professionals, patients and their families in understanding and evaluating ethical values and their consequences in a particular situation. Ethics consultation as it is practised at the university hospital of Freiburg is a special professional service offered by members of an academic institution. The practical approach and t...

Cancer diagnoses and treatments can be crisis-causing events that overwhelm the usual coping abilities of patients and their families. Oncology nurses constantly are observing and attending to patients' diverse needs, ranging from biomedical to emotional, social, and psychological. Nurses have the chance to be first responders in times of patient crises, as they are in the position to recognize...

Critical incidents are sudden, unexpected, often life-threatening time-limited events that may overwhelm an individual's capacity to respond adaptively. Frequently, extreme critical incident stressors may result in personal crises, traumatic stress, and even Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. This paper presents a concise, fully-referenced, state-of-the-art review of crisis intervention procedures ...

This article incorporates a cognitive problem-solving intervention model in a case report of a chronically abused woman from Roberts’ continuum of the extent and chronicity level of women battering. It depicts Prochaska and DiClemente’s stages of change and Roberts’ crisis intervention model in the progressive movement from living in a battering situation to leaving the relationship and becomin...