Mr. Pat Bergin:

We developed a campus support service for staff one and a half years ago. We now have an organisational psychologist on site who provides direct support to staff. She has developed infrastructural support mechanisms for staff. I made reference in my statement to the critical incident management system, which is a peer-support structure. A total of 23 staff were trained up on CISM. They provide ongoing peer support to staff during times of crisis. The programme has been put in for an award and is the first of its kind. The benefits have been noticed.

We use the employee assistance programme for supports. There may be issues for staff that are external to the campus, but they come to the fore within the campus because of the job. Our on-site organisational psychologist will provide direct support for staff. She meets them and uses signposts from different directions. We try to use peer support and undertake debriefings. We have put in place a range of measures. After incidents, we look at debriefing staff to elicit the learning outcomes and how things can be better. A comprehensive programme has been undertaken in the past ten or 12 months around any incident that has occurred.

That is where staff would have some input. We have also been trying to develop a system of one manager for one staff team so that if a team works well together it will share, pull together and address issues together. This is how this matter is best addressed. This has been a key focus for us and over the past few months it has very much helped us to deal with some of the challenges we have faced as a staff team. We continue to engage with staff on an ongoing basis and there is now quite a positive and open relationship between staff, staff representatives and ourselves when it comes to solving problems and moving things forward.