Mr. Robert Morton:

There are two sides to it, namely, the formal and the informal levels of support. As for informal supports, the most important support available to any emergency medical technician, EMT, or dispatcher or call-taker in the National Emergency Operations Centre, NEOC, environment is his or her supervisor. The attitude, approach and level of support, psychological or otherwise, offered by that person colours the worker's experience of work every day. After that, there is the line manager. We consider those two supports together to be the most important informal supports.

Formally, if someone needs support beyond that, whether psychological or physical, the HSE provides a range of supports, including occupational health employee assistance. We have a joint partnership group with our trade union partners, known as the critical incident stress management committee, which focuses on creating an holistic network of peer support workers.

These are individual paramedics, EMTs, intermediate care operatives, call takers or dispatchers who have volunteered to act as a support to their colleagues. They receive specific training in critical incident stress management. We have been to the forefront in this area for probably the best part of 20 years and it has worked quite well. However, it is fair to say that the holistic range of supports are not necessarily holistically wrapped around the individual staff member. Our HR department has worked over the past two years to create a programme called WellNAS, which is widely promoted. One of the learnings from the programme is that we recognised that we need to better prepare our clinical staff and, broadly speaking, our operational staff for the job. For the past two years in particular, we have introduced personal resilience training for all new graduates coming into the NAS.

We hope these programmes are beginning to make a difference. We need more supports and we have plans to looking more at occupational psychology and more clinical psychology support but we recognise that the environment within which our staff work is changing dramatically and we need to increase the level and range of supports available. Importantly, we need to make sure that our managers and supervisors are focusing on supporting their colleagues. That is the most important intervention we could make.