By Editorial Staff
While protecting and serving your community as a first responder is uniquely rewarding, it also comes with a host of factors that impact your mental, emotional and physical health. Shift schedules alone make it difficult to fit in exercise, healthy meal planning and adequate rest for recharging. Add in intense and traumatic calls and it’s a recipe for sleepless nights and atypical stress.
As such, it’s crucial for law enforcement leaders to prioritize the mental health of their officers by providing wellness initiatives and resources to support their overall well-being. By taking a look at what agencies are doing to support members, we can better understand the current state of mental health support for first responders and to identify areas for improvement and opportunities for leaders to better support their officers’ mental health needs.
Download the wellness assessment at the top right-hand corner of this article and see how your agency stacks up. If your agency doesn’t make the grade, check out these resources for adding more wellness support to your agency:
- Battling officer stress through building resiliency: Georgia POST’s law enforcement resiliency program is designed to build mental, physical, social, spiritual and financial health
- 6 trauma management best practices for police organizations: Make mental health a priority to strengthen your personnel’s resilience
- Key components of a successful officer wellness program: The Bakersfield PD and Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office are leaders in prioritizing officer wellness. Here’s a summary of their best practices
- Implementing a program to reduce and manage police officer injuries: Chief Benjamin Bliven and Tactical Athletic Trainer Traci Tauferner discuss the strategies they are deploying to maintain officer wellness at the Wausau Police Department
- 5 ways leaders can be part of the wellness solution: Here’s what you can do today and in the long-term to develop a culture of wellness in your department
- How police leaders can set officers on a pathway to resilience: Download a resiliency checklist to measure the four most effective pathways to resilience: hardiness, self-enhancement, repressive coping and positive emotions
Fill out the form at the top right-hand corner of this article to download a wellness assessment to see how your agency ranks.