Training in first aid is not sufficient to prepare people for the psychological strain they will undertake both during and after taking part in a first aid situation. Medical personnel often conduct a debrief after severe incidents. However, first aid providers are seldom included.
Follow-up Program for First Aid Providers – Helse Stavanger HF
Following a serious emergency, First Aiders can be ‘left questioning their actions, abilities, or capacity to help in the future’ Snobelen – Helping Those Who Help. Without a clear pathway for debriefing and follow-up support, these questions can have a damaging impact on the wellbeing of First Aiders. Unknown or fatal outcomes can be particularly hard for people to process, leaving First Aiders feeling guilty, uncertain or incompetent. Incidents involving friends, colleagues and family-members can also be highly challenging, for personal reasons.
A debriefing enables First Aiders to put their minds to rest in relation to specific technical First Aid questions, helping them to process their own trauma response and to explore any troubling emotions experienced. Ideally, a First Aider will leave a debriefing with an appreciation of how they made a positive difference and a normalized view of the impact trauma can have on our ability to respond predictably in a crisis. Debriefing can also act as an important point for mental health triage, enabling early signposting to appropriate mental health support services.
This self-assessment worksheet from Lifelines Scotland highlights the many factors that might add up to a high risk to mental health post-incident.
First Aider follow-up is routinely offered in Norway ‘to people who have been present or provided first aid to an unconscious person,’ (RAKOS, 2023). This model involves a consultation with an experienced health care professional and, where possible, information on patient outcome.
‘Postvention’ models are becoming more widespread to support anyone affected by suicide; they include ‘the use of trained volunteers in support and therapy groups, workplace training programs and arts-based interventions’ (Ramamurthy et al., 2025), however this model has not been applied to other First Aid scenarios.
We can learn a lot from other professions e.g. medical professions, but do bear in mind that First Aid is a different context. First Aiders will have had significantly less training or exposure to traumatic situations than medical professionals. It is not necessarily useful to be debriefed by someone with significantly more medical experience than you if they have lost touch of the context in which emergency First Aid is provided.
Debriefing should help you to understand that your response to a frightening abnormal situation was normal.
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