Officer Wellness
COURSE NAME
COURSE OVERVIEW
There's always that one person at work who never has anything positive to say, riles up other team members, and makes work life miserable. In order to have effective agencies, we've got to proactively deal with these difficult and toxic employees. The most important thing when dealing with dysfunctional or toxic people is you have to take action from the first line supervisor. In this course, Dr. Marshall Jones will discuss the cost of difficult and toxic employee performance, how to deal with difficult employees, and how leaders can prevent toxic employees.
Most first responders admit to struggling with nutrition and struggling with health concerns. This is often due to the long-term stress, elevated cortisol, and the daily habits of a first responder. In this course, Natalie Hunt will discuss action steps to help students build healthier habits, how to shop for healthy options that are affordable, and how to pre-prepare breakfast, snacks, and lunch to help them eat healthy even in a high demand schedule.
Yoga is often viewed as intricate movements only for the flexible, but this is not accurate. Yoga and breath work can have tremendous benefits, especially for first responders. In this course, Natalie Hunt will lead the student through exercises designed to offset physical tension, reduce stress and anxiety, and overall improve physical and mental well-being.
Because they work in a high stress environment, it is vital for telecommunicators to learn tools to better care for and nourish their body. In this course, Natalie Hunt will discuss activities that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, breathing techniques that can reduce stress, the importance of sleep and how to get a good night’s rest, examples of balanced, healthy meals, and how to become an advocate for health in your PSAP.
In this course, Dr. Mike Pittaro discusses stress, work-life balance, and negative coping strategies and how officers can break those negative cycles. He will explain the negative effects of cortisol and techniques to reduce stress and increase both physical and mental wellness.
This course covers financial planning as it applies to law enforcement, including common mistakes and how to avoid them. Over the course of two hours, Bob Harris and Travis George discuss the importance of a sound financial plan and the necessary tools for comprehensive financial management.
Officer involved shootings are worst-case scenario situations that no officer wants to face, but when they occur, what happens after? In this course, Sam Causey provides the student with valuable knowledge about how to survive and thrive post-trauma based on his own firsthand experience with an officer involved shooting.
This course is an abbreviated edition of the 9-1-1 Training Institute’s five-hour specialized training on recognizing and managing the stress that comes with being a telecommunicator, including having a resilient mindset and techniques to deal with stressors while on the job and in your personal life.
There is a saying in law enforcement, “Practice officer safety; make sure you go home at the end of your shift.” However, making it home is just the beginning. “Watch Your Six: Mental Wellness Resiliency” encourages and equips all law enforcement officers and their families to guard the six most vulnerable areas of life to promote health and well-being. The course talks about the issues facing law enforcement to create awareness of the problems and to offer officers resources needed to ensure every part of their lives is healthy.
This course is designed to provide law enforcement and corrections officers with knowledge to recognize, prepare for, and react to encountering blood and other potentially infectious materials in common law enforcement and corrections workplaces. This course will familiarize officers with common elements of exposure control plans, different types of personal protective equipment (PPE), and some of the common bloodborne and airborne pathogens that officers may be exposed to in their work environments.
Wellness can be defined as “the state of being in good physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual health, especially as an actively pursued goal." Police literature related to wellness tends to focus on what needs to do be done within a broad mental or physical scope to minimize the threat of injury or death among law enforcement officers of all ranks. These dimensions are made up of five “domains” which are critical to surviving the cumulative effect of living the police life. Getting too far out of balance in these domains damages our overall wellness and can increase our risk for injury, on-duty death, and suicide.
Hiring the right fit and preparing those employees for a lifelong journey in mental and physical wellness in this profession and beyond is the foundation of this course. It contains tools to assist the 9-1-1 professional in managing vicarious trauma and the importance of deploying these resources in daily life.
This course explores the many issues and problems police officers commonly face with stress in their careers. The first hour outlines the traps into which many officers fall, the difference between stress and trauma, and how critical incidents and cumulative stress can shorten a career. In the second hour, students will learn several easy steps by which they can avoid the impacts of chronic stress.
This course explores the relationship between human fatigue and important biological functions that impact not only personal well-being and officer safety but organizational liability and overall risk management.