Meeting of the Parliament 06 June 2019
I thank Alex Cole-Hamilton for the opportunity to debate this important matter. His motion calls on the Scottish Government to bring forward a national first responder trauma recovery strategy, and I am pleased to support that call. We are all hugely appreciative of our first responders. We are beyond grateful to all who intervene to save lives. In some cases, they are not professionals, but people who step in until trained first responders arrive at the scene.
One of my brothers has been a firefighter for 22 years. I asked him about his experience of accessing support, whether there are any barriers and, if so, what they might be. He has good support at home. His wife is a neonatal nurse and is ideally placed to understand the desire to protect and preserve life, because that is what they have chosen to do for a living. She knows him well enough to understand what kind of day he might have had without the need for him to go into the sort of detail that he might not be ready to share at the end of a shift and that might take some time to come to terms with.
When I ask him how he is getting on, he will tell me about station banter, communal cooking on shift and how busy it has been, but he does not go into detail. However, as members might imagine, in an on-going career of more than two decades to date, he has seen what he describes as “horror stories”.
I know that he was sent to the Clutha helicopter crash that Brian Whittle mentioned. Most of us will never come across a badly burned body and we will never see a body hemmed in and slumped over a steering wheel, never to move again. We may have seen loved ones as they have passed away. That is never easy, whether it is expected or not, but it is exceptionally demanding when someone’s everyday work is focused on helping people in the most challenging of circumstances.
My brother appears to take much of it in his stride, and that is a testament to the training provided by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. However, there are occasions when he and his colleagues are faced with demanding, uncertain events, with outcomes that devastate people and their families.
In his experience in the fire service, if there is a fatality or a critical incident, a questionnaire is sent to the firefighter’s home address—it is sent there to give that person the space and time that they need to complete it, if they wish to. It is voluntary. In 22 years of service, my brother has filled in the four-page questionnaire on many occasions. He says that it is very well designed to elicit the information required. In 22 years, he has requested to use the counselling service once, as he had been experiencing flashbacks following a critical incident.
The counsellor he saw was hugely helpful to him in processing the particular experience that had sent him there. However, he is clear that it is vitally important that counsellors have the appropriate skills, as there is the potential to hinder rather than help. He is hugely grateful to the excellent staff at the Rivers centre in Edinburgh.
He understands that, at times, what might be called bottling it up can be a perfectly understandable coping mechanism, but that at other times professional assistance to share information and process it in the most helpful manner is essential. He told me that when he went to the Rivers centre he was expecting people in white coats, but it was the polar opposite—he said that people could take their partner, wife or friend to the appointment.
Clearly, my brother is speaking as a member of the fire service and cannot speak for all first responders or for our other essential emergency services, but he firmly believes that such services must be available to all first responders in all emergency services and outwith them, including individuals who intervene in traumatic situations and social workers, who may experience situations that we cannot comprehend. They all need that help to be in place.
My brother is content for me to share his experience in order to help ensure that no one hesitates to ask for help when they require it. It is important that first responders and our emergency services do not feel that we expect them to be superhuman—dealing with extreme situations on a daily basis, but unable to admit that they need to take care of themselves, not just us. We must ensure that, when it is needed, the right help is there, as a matter of urgency. That is the least that we can do.
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