File: 033721-transcript
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And I was just reminding myself to push record because this will be recorded. So good morning, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today at this National Institute Corrections webinar.

Titled identifying evidence to inform resources for the reduction of staff trauma and organizational stress in the prison and jail settings. So over the next 60 min, we're going to confront one of the most critical yet historically under addressed challenges facing modern corrections. The mental health, safety, and wellbeing of a workflow.

Course and I am so thrilled to have you join us here today. I'm gonna cover just a few quick important housekeeping items. The webinar is scheduled to last approximately 1 h. The session will be recorded. Once captioned and made five oh eight compliant, it will be available on our NIC website. If you've registered for the webinar, you will be notified when it's up. This is a listen only event, meaning the participant's microphones are muted. However.

We strongly encourage engagements through our Webex chat function. Please use your chat to share your thoughts, ask questions, request technical support. We will try to address as many questions as possible during the Q and A portion at the end of the session. To practice chat function, everyone enter the answer for the following.

What are your interests in today's webinar? What brought you here? I also like to encourage the use of emojis. It helps motivate our speakers why we're moving forward. So if you can find your emojis at the bottom of the page as well, can everyone give me a smiley face or.

Thumbs up, and if you can't find them, give me a big sad face. If you happen to have any audio difficulties, we recommend connecting to, the webinar via phone. And that should be in the original e.

Email. Now, I would like to take just 1 min and pass you over to one of our amazing librarians at the National Institute of Corrections to tell you just a little bit about an amazing resource. Mary?

Thank you Chad. I'm Mary Coffman. I'm one of the information specialists here at NIC. You may already know that you can browse the NIC website to find the NIC publications that are the latest published, but do you know how to access the rest of our other great resources? When you sign up for a free user account, you can access the NIC website to get additional.

Access to more of what the library offers. We have correctional policies, training curricula, procedure manuals, peer reviewed research, and rare books in addition to ebooks, audio books, and videos, all available online. You can research us by or you can reach us by our help desk through the website.

You can also visit the library for training in Colorado. Just stop by before your class or during one of your breaks to check our resources. On the NIC website, you can also find a list of the NIC courses open for registration on the service and training schedules pages. We have NIC as in person, online and hybrid training throughout the year and all our classes are free. Chad I'll pass it back to you.

Thank you so very much. And with that, dr. Owens, mic is yours.

Thank you Captain Garrett. Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is dr. Dina Owens.

I'm a national programs advisor.

With the prisons division at the National Institute of Corrections. I'm honored to be here with you all today, and I also want to acknowledge my colleague in partner on this project Miss Belinder D Stewart. She serves alongside me as the other program manager for this initiative, and we are grateful that you all have joined us.

Today's webinar is entitled identifying evidence to inform resources for the reduction of staff trauma and organizational stress in prison and jail settings. Correctional professionals across all roles that include security, custody, case management, health care, education, chaplancy.

And more play an essential role in the support, safety, healthy work environments. Your presence today reflects just your commitment to that mission. As we know, correctional workers experience both direct and indirect exposures to crisis ranging from daily probation to life threatening events.

These experiences contribute to high levels of stress, burnout, and other adverse mental health effects. So today's session is gonna focus on evidence based approaches and practical tools that we can use to reduce the impact of trauma and organizational stress.

Across corrections environments. This webinar was gonna highlight the findings of phase two of nic's two year national project that was informed by scoping research and a natural survey of correctional staff. Your hear from, you will hear today from two exceptional experts whose work has contributed.

Secondly to the corrections workforce, Force wellbeing. Dr. Mozam El Jazari is the associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Law, whose research focuses on workplace safety, violence prevention, and total worker health approaches within public sector. Dr. Lisa Yeagers is a professor at st. Louis University.

Who leads national total worker health research within corrections and co directs this NIC project. During today's session, you will identify types of critical incidents that contribute to staff trauma, explore evidence based practices that maybe a good fit for your workplace.

Review commonly used national programs in their effectiveness, better understand the differing perspectives between custody and non custody staff on those available supports. Before we begin, just a quick reminder, this, like Captain Garrett said, this webinar is being recorded.

Also throughout the presentation, you will see a link being dropped in the chat for a survey that we ask that you kindly fill out at the end of the program. So for your best experience, please join from a quiet location and use a hands free device or handset to ensure that your Webex connection is stable.

So thank you again for being here and thank you for the work that you do every day. And with that, I'd like to introduce, let my colleague Belinda introduce herself, and we are pleased to welcome and then turn the presentation over to our two presenters, dr. El Jazari and dr. Yeagers. Belinda?

Thank you so much Dina. My name is Belinda Stewartt and I am also a national program advisor with the prisons division. I have been, as Dina said, a part of this work since the inception, and we are so excited and proud to present.

To you today, the progress that we are making along the way. This has been a labor of love, it's work that very much needs to be done in our field to reduce staff trauma and organizational stress within our organizations. I'm also gonna be the person today that's checking the chat for your questions.

So as you have questions, please put them in the chat and we will try to get to those at the conclusion of the workshop. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to our speakers. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Belinda. Thank you, dr. Owens and Captain Garrett for the introduction. And hi everyone and thank you for joining us today. My name Island Gazierra. Dr. Owens has introduced me and I'll be pre co presenting with my collaborator for almost more than a decade after Lisa Eagers on this work. In an effort to be trauma informed, we want to let you know before we get started with our webinar that there will be sensitive terminology used in this presentation that reflects trauma and critical incidents.

So this project as introduced was funded by a competitive agreement in phase one and currently in phase two by the National Institute of Corrections. The team was guided by the NIC National Program advisors, dr. Dana Owens and Belinda Stewart, and the project research team includes dr. Lisa Yegers as a COPI.

Dr. Martin Sherniak as the consultant on the project and myself and a group of graduate students from UMAS Global and st. Clus University that has supported us throughout the project. As we navigate this webinar, I would like to acknowledge the National Corrections Collaborative Project Task Force who provided guidance through the lifetime of this cooperative agreement since almost.

2021, the correctional wellness consortium out of miss Radiosi and most importantly the correction workers in participating jails and prisons and other correctional facilities who responded to our survey. So in this webinar, we'll be providing you with a brief background on correctional worker health and well being followed by the definitions that we adopted for the.

The project for staff trauma and organization stress, and we'll provide overview of the project that we conducted to identify resources to address stress and trauma to correction workers. Then we'll be presenting the evidence through the findings from a scoping review and literature review that we conducted, then the national survey across jail and prison settings and.

A PCIS observation that we conducted in Missouri as well in South Carolina. And the last section of the webinar will explore actions to take and future directions to consider based on the findings followed by question and answer. So when we look at the prison and jail settings and other correctional institutions across the US, consider them as like small towns of cities within these systems, other workforce sectors enter and provide services, including public safety, sector, healthcare workers, social assistant, educators, and among many others.

Our project, we used variety of sources in this phase two of the project or year two to identify correction workers beyond correct shell officers that has direct impact in contact with the incarcerated populations. And we used resources from the Bureau of Justice assistance, Bureau of justice statistics, the NIC, the NIJ.

As well as we seek guidance from the stakeholders through the National Corrections collaborative CWC as well as the Department of corrections. In order to identify who are the correction workers beyond COs in prison and jail setting and other facilities in the US. Unfortunately.

That data on other correction workforce categories is not widely captured, which necessarily need us exploring that through extensive research through all the agencies and resources identified in a minute. So within that, we know that there is almost based on the statistics more than 377 70000 correction workers or officers in this case in JLM prison settings. However, the data on other categories that you see on the right side of the slide such as healthcare workers, mental healthcare workers, educators, social services.

Is pretty much not that much identified in the literature. So some statistics that we have, we have estimates of almost 30000 registered nurses and almost 40000 14000 educators in correction setting. So that's why we went through a lot of like research in terms of identifying these categories. But for.

Why this matters and why we're exploring job categories beyond the correctional officers. So in the US, as I noted before, there are more than 370000 correctional officers that we know about, and there are other correctional workers that have high rates of non fatal work related injuries stress PDSD, suicide and crowding diseases compared to other public safety sectors. And they have.

Health and well being of correctional workers lacks behind others in this public safety sector when it comes to their health outcomes. And this can be associated with a lot of contextual risk factors included such within the jobs such as inmate related or the population they deal with, the occupation itself, the organizational admissed.

Of concern as well as psychosocial factors. And like many sectors, they are experiencing high risk of exposure to violence staffing shortages where in the past two decades in 2022 was the lowest staffing shortages when it comes to correctional workers. And there is high stress burnout, and trauma.

That is now highlighting in the last ten years more and more demand for strategies to address this workforce. So when it comes to wellness and well being corrections regardless of the term being used, we need to consider individual and system approaches when we are addressing good correction workforce. Lisa, i'll turn it back to you at this point.

Lisa, you're, you're still on mute.

Thanks so much Mozin. I want to say that we might be on our 1st poll at this point. So, I believe we're gonna discuss our.

The wellness versus well being and corrections and.

And we are considering what are the ways.

That we look at these terms, wellness and well being.

So I want to put it out to the audience. Can you tell us how do you define, well being? What does wellbeing mean to you at work?

And that poll is open for you guys right now.

Well, if you wanna go ahead and put your answers into that poll, that would be awesome.

Awesome. We've had a lot of conversations about these terms, wellness versus well being, and we're gonna explore that a little bit more with you. So if you wouldn't mind just take a moment to.

Add your thoughts to that poll. We really appreciate it. It kind of frames how we consider moving forward with a lot of the models and types of frameworks that we use to address staff trauma.

Overall. So, feel free to share your thoughts and I want to take a step back. Thanks to everyone so much for being here today and it's quite exciting for us to have such a amazing group from different departments of corrections here, different types of roles in your workplaces.

I see many folks from all different arrays of, of workplaces, including policy, national organizations, different state corrections, so thanks so much. So I'm seeing some chat responses here. We have folks considering safety and self self care while being related to, let's see here. Overall balance.

Between self care and service delivery, health and emotions, life work balance, the ability to manage all types of stress in a healthy way, perceived and projected overall measures of emotional balance. Awesome.

Being able to balance work and life outside of work effectively, I love that considering what happens inside the workplace and in the larger community for people. Thinking well being is overall safety and ability to function. Awesome. Well being both physical safety and mental health.

This is great. You're spot on. So I'll move to Thank you so much and continue adding to the chat. I'm gonna move to some of the formal, ways that we consider these terms. So we continue to consider.

Wellness and well being as defined in corrections in workplace health and using this national Institute for occupational safety and health model called or strategy called total worker health. So wellness is more of an individual focus.

Well, well being is broader. So wellness typically refers to individual health behaviors and personal lifestyle choices. We've got well being including those behaviors, but also considering how work, the environment, organizational culture, job design, and factors outside of work influence health. We also consider.

Our responsibility includes not only the worker but also a shared partnership with workplaces. So more traditional wellness programs can emphasize what employees do to improve their own personal health while well being is recognizing the organization also plays a critical role. And so we have different types of work.

Place programs and they can be wellness initiatives like programs for fitness challenges, nutrition education, on site gems. And wellbeing initiatives may expand further, so beyond personal health to include flexible scheduling, manageable workloads, maybe fair or different compensation.

Supportive leadership and safe working conditions along with the promotion of resources. So the overall goals are distinct for these terms and we just want to sort of share those, those different perspectives. So thank you so much for that.

Now, as we move forward, we consider also in this project definitions, in terms of what we think of for staff trauma, those deeply distressing or disturbing experiences, and we consider both direct trauma and.

Indirect trauma. Direct trauma could be those situations of violence. It could be fights occurring. It could be attempted or completed self harm, assaults or.

Threats to assault staff and use of force.

So those traumatic incidents, for sure. Now, indirect trauma, some folks may call it secondary or intentionally using that term indirect trauma because they are certainly.

Important as well. So reviewing materials related to traumatic incidents in in charts or in files, videos, pictures, writing those incident reports and debriefing. So organizational stress is related to the nature of the job.

The role within the organization's support and rewards at work and organizational structure and climate. So in this project, we consider the different phases that have occurred. This has been amazing, an amazing project. In phase one, we were looking at the depth of literature.

Sure specific to correctional officers. In that literature review of many thousands of studies, we only found 25 that address correction staff and organizational, staff trauma and organizational stressors. We also ran a nationwide survey that looked at the needs of officers, middle management and leadership and their perceptions of what's going on. We had 1300 responses from 38 states. Now in phase.

It's two, the topic of today's webinar, we're going to be discussing this ongoing project and how we're adding to this literature search, including as many correctional job titles as possible. We're looking at direct inmate contact beyond the correctional officer job series. So examples are healthcare.

Mental health, probation and approval, non health care social services, case management, those educators and prisons and jails, guidance counselors, career counselors, spiritual services, and more. So we also work to characterize critical incidents, and I'll be reviewing another scoping review of literature there as well.

Most critical incidents are things such as assaults, medical emergencies, and exposure to traumatic events that can lead to staff trauma and negatively impact physical and mental health. So moving along, we're considering as well.

What we've shared from phase one, and we want to let you know about two awesome resources that NIC has there on their website. One is our past webinar to share those phase one results. And then we also have this brief report, and I'll put in the chat a link to that brief report as well.

In case you want to, find it easily. So this brief report, highlights some of our findings and these projects have been so amazing because they've uncovered what is the evidence available to address.

S, you know, correctional staff, organizational stressors and trauma, the resources that we can utilize, and what you'll find is there's many gaps and we're still trying to learn more. However, this project has led to.

Further funding from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, where we're able to share in person and in a live hybrid event that'll be recorded. We're going to share real case scenarios. We're gonna have a full day event.

To, to really do a deeper dive as well. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna place information about that in the chat as well for you. Let's see here. So moving forward.

Mozin is also going to tell us about the participatory nature of our project and how so many folks have come together to inform this.

Thank you, Lisa. So engaging the stakeholders was really the core of this cooperative agreement since 2021. So since year one of or phase one of this project, we relied heavily on the national corrections collaborative. It's a group that has been formed almost a decade ago, and Lisa and I have been coordinating and we helped like three national symposia through the NCC and currently Lisa is holding additional symposia through Nayash funding. So the National corrections collaborative, we expect.

Handed on their membership that we had in year one, given that we expanded the job category series beyond correctional officers to other correction workers with direct contact with the incarcerated population and in year we included in that like a variety of experts from corrections, union representatives, health.

Representatives, federal agency representatives, and academia as well as we see from this slide here. So throughout the phase two of the projects since 2023, we held total of eight virtual meetings and I'm glad to see a lot of the members that are present today to attend the webinar from the participants, and in these meetings we start input.

From the National Corrections collaborative project task force on the job categories that we illustrated in earlier slide on the survey items that we identified and we replicated from phase one and we expanded in phase two to include the critical incidents and also on the methodology and the terms to include in our scoping review.

In addition to other aspects from recruitment of participants reaching out to their network and feedback and guidance throughout this cooperative agreement.

So throughout this project, we use several guiding frameworks that can illustrate in the next slide. So we recognize that there are a variety of stakeholders in corrections, including the workforce, the consumers, the larger community, so that's why we felt like we need different frameworks so we can have the scope of.

Influences impacting the stress and trauma and the changes in this sector. The 1st model that you see here on the screen is the US general framework for workplacement mental health and wellbeing. This framework plays out five essential components centered around the worker voices. 2nd model in the next slide, in terms of the.

Guiding framework, what you see on the left side of the slide is the social ecological model where staff trauma and organizational stress is affected by interaction between the individual, i. E. The correction worker, the groups that they interact with, the supervisor, the workgroup, the, whoever is in their life as well, the organization or the.

Institution, the jail or prison or other correctional facility, the communities, the general public, the neighborhood, and the physical and social and political environments at the city county state and the federal level that impact the federal policy. The 3rd model that was guiding our like work in this cooperative agreement, it's on the previous slide is the level of prevent.

We focus on the public health approach focusing on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. Where primary prevention is stopping or preventing the trauma and organizational stress before it occurs. We develop education and other strategies to identify the risk, increase the buffers, and reduce vulnerabilities in order.

Whether it prevent the exposure per se. The secondary prevention is the immediate and effective response to staff trauma and stress including emergency care. It is interventions intended mostly to address immersion short term consequences and reduce the negative impact. Last but not least is the tertiary prevention, which is the long term response to staff trauma on.

Organization's tress and intervention in this scope are intended to reduce the long term negative impact and the rehabilitation consequences of the exposure. The last framework in the next slide is the hierarchy of control applied to the Total Worker Health, where we have five components eliminating work conditions that threatened safety and well being.

Substituting health enhancing's policies, programs and practices redesigning the work environment for safety, health and well being and educating for safety and health and wellbeing. And last but not least encouraging personal change. So you can recognize from this hierarchy is focusing at the organizational's change and then funneling out to the individual change as we can see. And this gets us to the next.

The slide where we have our second poll. And before we talk about the next poll, I would like to point out for the participant that is like an a Slido icon on the lower right corner of the Webex that you can click on to access the Slido. And this poll, as a correction worker, have you, how are you able to give input at your organization regarding safety and wellbeing? And I'll see if this poll is open yet on Slido.

The poll is open and it's we've got some responses coming.

That's great. Thank you Captain Garrett.

And again, just make sure that you are using that Slido button, and it looks like we've got lots of people who are rocking and rolling.

Yeah, it looks like we've got about.

50 people who've responded thus far.

That's great.

And let us know whenever we can look at the.

Distribution of the responses.

And that's great. I'm gonna I'm seeing a lot of people in the chat are also responding about like other like approach like how they are like being able to share their input.

So you should be able to see the results now, but it looks like, about 33 % of the people have had a high opportunity.

This is great like more than one 3rd of the participants. We appreciate your response to that and that will lead us to start presenting the evidence about like these resources from the scoping review that Lisa is gonna lead.

Awesome, thanks so much. So I am gonna present the evidence from our 1st scoping review of discussion today. If we can go to the next slide. This series of arrows shows the.

A really strong amount of.

Searching and trying to locate any sort of research or articles that indicate evidence about organizational and stress trauma resources for corrections. So the search included articles published during the last 20 years and only 67 studies.

Unfortunately you met our criteria. That's great. But when you look at the top of that diagram that says 90267 studies, our students and masters and doctoral students I need to shout out to them for all of their diligent work in reviewing 90000 down to.

76000, looking at 734 full tech studies to ultimately find 67 that met our criteria for better understanding what resources are available. So on the next slide, we're, we'll start talking about the themes of these.

Interventions that we found. So this graph provides an overview of those major themes that emerged from the scoping review of literature. We have training and education, stress reduction techniques. Those were the most frequently found studies.

Followed by mental health and health mentoring, organizational management, and mental health and stress management. When we look at this in a variety of ways, starting with the next slide, we're gonna consider those models that Mozin just reviewed with us. So we're looking at it from a social ecological model, we consider our top.

So this view suggests that studies at the levels of community and public policy are needed. Now when we go to the next slide, we consider levels of prevention. In this case, we, we really promote as much primary prevention as possible. This looks promising because there were 37 studies that identified ways to prevent staff trauma and organizational stress before it occurs. So.

So we really like that upfront looking ahead. As compared to we have 26 studies in this secondary level area indicating resources to have an immediate and effective response to incidents when they occur. So that's awesome. We wanna consider, more and more in these primary and secondary levels for sure.

So we are coming to our next poll and thanks again for your participation in the last ones. Now that we've presented our 1st portion of phase two findings from the review of literature, we want to hear from you again. What area do you feel your organization focuses on most?

For addressing stress and trauma. And here's some, some ideas. Do you feel that you, look more at policies or practices or maybe peer supports? Maybe staff and leadership training? What sort of areas do you feel are higher levels of focus?

With within your organizations.

So that poll is open and you guys should be able to.

Payer support is what we see the most of.

But again, the votes are still coming in. Right now we're at 44 % 47 % that are saying it's peer support.

Awesome, and we had a lot of findings about peer support in our phase one study, and there are, I believe there's one publication out so far from that.

From dr. PM Fallin, that was a topic of her her research. So peer support is certainly an amazing way to consider interpersonal peer to peer connections and the more we can learn about it, the better because it is highly utilized.

Yeah, so it looks like we had, we're at 52 % that are saying peer support. 15 % say policies, 16 % say staffing leadership training. 3 % said other, 9 % said none, and 4 % said practices.

Awesome. Thanks so much for your responses there. I'm gonna turn it back over to Mozin who's gonna discuss the findings from our survey.

Task force to decide upon the most commonly used programs, focusing on policies practices, peer support, training for leadership and staff, including critical incidents. So 1st and foremost, we focused on the job categories and what to include in the survey and we illustrated that earlier. Policies were considered like by definition to inform and govern staff behaviors.

That are used to set expectations and guidance for the correctional operations. Practices are important activities that are intended to improve the quality of work. Peers support which was mostly like in the poll by the respondents here are considered for meeting with peers to discuss personal or emotional issues related to the workplace. Leadership and staff training is.

And then intended to address that from my organization's stress, and we added like another like domain in the survey in phase two based on the cooperative agreement to explore the types and exposures to critical indescendants among correction workshop workers. The last area on the survey we gathered workplace and participant demographic characteristics. We designed the survey.

The snapshot of who completed it and we really appreciate everyone who took the time from their busy schedule to respond to our survey. A total of 1730 ft four participants agreed to complete the survey. Correction workers were from 43 states and one US territory and with 47 % from the Midwest, 28.

Percent from the Northeast and mid Atlantic, 16 % from the south and 9 % from the west. When we looked at the job categories of who were the correction workers who answered and responded to our survey, almost one 3rd represented security or correctional officers. 19 % represented probation and parole.

Percent represented like healthcare, non mental health, and mental health care 2 % or 3 % represented education. 2 % were health non health care social services or case management and less than 0.5 % represented superitural services and others were other job categories between front line and administrative.

Positions. In terms of the demographics distribution of the participants, more than half of the participants were females with a mean age of 46.5 years, their mean years in current position in corrections was 10.4 and overall their mean years in corrections were 14 point 76 years.

Were from unified system and 6 % were from other correctional facilities. As for the security level, it was a mixed response. The highest was from multiple security levels followed by medium, then minimum and maximum security. And we have administrative representation as well.

Moving to the participant response to these policies that address staff trauma and stress. In these in this domain and the following domains, we're telling a story here about we the questions that we asked to the participants. So on the left side of this bar graph, you'll see the examples of policies that were identified.

Schedules or protected the break. So in terms of how we ask the question, what we, what is the responses or the story that we are trying to tell based on the analysis? In the blue bar, you are seeing here the percentage of participants who said yes, they are aware of a certain policy.

So let's say about the briefing after traumatic incidents, 64 % said they are yes aware, and the question we asked them, are you aware of this policy? Yes, NO or not sure. So this is only the yes aware. Of those who answered yes, in the orange bar, you can see those who were aware of it yes, and they used.

Orange bar that you can see. However, when practices are used, you can see the the green bar really increases in terms of how helpful they are. Some of the practices in this graph you can see are confidential supportive decision staff discussions, promoting a supportive positive culture, volunteer social support programs.

And as well health and well being committee that we see on this slide. In the next slide, we see also increase in these practices in terms of intern it rises almost to the 60 % for internal sharing of positive employee recognition, and we can see that the awareness is high, but the use is low, however.

The helpfulness is high whenever they use it.

And the last slide about practices is referral to AAAP, almost 84 participants, and this is the highest in practices participants are aware about it. However, only one 3rd of those who are said yes and aware are using it. And however, 50 % say it's helpful.

In the blue bar you can see how much said they said that they are aware of peer support in the orange if they said yes and they are using it and of those who use it, how much it's helpful. And it's sort of like the 40 plus percent or more that represented the poll here in this webinar, we can see how much participants identified peer support as helpful. So awareness of peer support options based on the survey respondents is moderate, uses the use of it is uneven ranging between 15 % to almost 21 %.

Percent or 22 %. However among the users of peer support many reported that is helpful, highlighting the potential impact when accessed and used. Last domain in the survey in the next slide focuses on training to address staff, trauma and stress, and in this we can recognize that training opportunities seem more low in the.

Thanks Mozam. So now we're going to come back to the literature, and the next portion of this project was to do a deep dive into critical incidents. We've had so many discussions about how do people describe critical critical incidents? What are their metrics used to capture them? What are they?

What are they defined as? So this is a a piece of the puzzle that we think is so important. Critical incidents are those potentially trauma inducing events like workplace violence, assaults, medical emergencies, and other stressors that may lead to staff trauma and negatively impact physical and mental health.

So we went to the literature again. We used keywords related to those critical incidents, traumatic events, workplace violence, stress, mental and physical health outcomes. And so the review included studies focusing on adult correctional workers and jails, prisons, and other correctional settings over the last 20 years.

So on the next slide, we'll discuss some of the findings. You're gonna see this complicated diagram here and basically like the last scoping review that I discussed, this diagram shows a summary of 83580 studies that are amazing. Masters and doctoral students reviewed.

Review. So those 134 studies are what I'm gonna talk about to describe those findings. So most studies were published between 2014 and 2024. They were primarily conducted in the US and in Canada.

The majority use quantitative designs followed by qualitative or those that are non numerical information. So that helps to explain people's experiences, perceptions, opinions or behaviors. And then there were also some review studies.

So most studies focused on correctional workers while fewer examined incarcerated individuals or did not clearly specify the population. So here's another complicated diagram. This is where we, we use that trauma informed disclaimer at the start of this. These are some tough.

Exposure to blood or bodily fluids along with other related stressors. I'm sure if you've worked in corrections, you've seen, maybe even been exposed to some of these really difficult situations. So it's, there's so many things going on and so this really tries to support categorizing it and and.

Finding a way to, to define them. So these findings highlight the wide range of critical incidents experienced by correctional workers and demonstrate that complex and high risk nature of correctional work environments. So on the next slide, we, we describe it as well, this is from the national survey. And so what was asked among the respondents, which of the following critical incidents occur within your job and have a pro.

Personal impact on you. So the prevalence of these critical incidents was extremely high across the studies highlighting the hazardous nature of correctional work. So going back to those studies nearly 90 % of correctional workers reported experiencing at least one critical incident was 60 to 90.

Further emphasizing the significant occupational risks in correctional settings. So more to come on this. There's publications in progress to do a deeper dive into that data. On our next slide, we consider interventions or those resources available, to address critical instances.

So with our interest in this, this project also explored specific resources. We visited state prison programs to learn about PCIS. So PCIS is one example of a resource. And I, I see, ok. So, we've got PCIS post critical incident seminars for correctional staff. This report is posted online or will be posted online through NIC. And so we had the opportunity to visit the Missouri team.

I went to Missouri's PCIS Mozin visited South Carolinas, and we're so grateful for these experiences. We were able to attend the entire duration of each event. And so kudos to the teams that are carrying out that really, really important work. So in this report, we conclude the PCIS.

Structured. So it offers meaningful psychological benefits, builds community and promotes long term healing. And so refinement often seen among many types of different wellness, well being programs and corrections. Refinement can include having that employee driven engagement, the data evaluation, and integration with organizational strategies to maximize effectiveness and sustainability. So great job to Missouri and South Carolina and others who are doing this.

Alright, the balls are open if you.

This is one of those failure owned answer in, so it'll take a second.

Great answers.

Wellness and well being.

Post critical incident support directly affects workplace culture. Staff burnout and trauma is very real and needs to be addressed from multiple levels. Thank you Tracy, for your response. Sherry says what stands out is how.

And investing in organizational systems that may make evidence based resources accessible, trusted, and sustainable. So we have four main points to highlight that correctional staff routinely experienced those high levels of trauma and organizational stress across all job categories, so we need to consider.

The security staff and the, the health care staff and the non security staff and, and all the folks involved. We also consider awareness of resources. It's generally higher than actual use. And we know there's a lot of barriers to using resources, so we want to explore that. When staff access available resources, they generally rep.

Include frontline staff, hear from them, listen, and design, implement and evaluate wellness initiatives based on their, their input. Regularly assess awareness, use, use use and helpfulness of existing resources. Find out what are people aware of, what are they actually using? If it's not getting used.

Engages those frontline workers and then translate findings into practical guidance. So, that sort of rounds out the project. Please feel free to put your questions in the chat. You can email us with questions as well, and we so appreciate your participation today. We want to acknowledge our project task force.

If there are NO questions, I wanna, I wanna again drop the link to the survey in the chat. So please before you log off, wait, I, I think there is one question.