Case Study Assignment

The Incident

The report comes in Two employees have been killed in the workplace, and two have been wounded. A witness has called 911, and the police and ambulances have arrived. The perpetrator (an agency employee) has been taken into custody, the victims are being sent to the hospital, and the police are interviewing witnesses and gathering evidence.

Response

In this situation, the agency’s crisis response plan called for the immediate involvement of:

1. A top management representative;
2. A security officer;
3. An employee relations specialist;
4. An Employee Assistance Program counselor; and
5. An official from the public affairs office.

Top Management Representative – The Manager, an Assistant Director of a field office with 800 employees, coordinated the response effort because she was the senior person on duty at the time. In addition to acting as coordinator, she remained available to police throughout the afternoon to make sure there were no impediments to the investigation.

She immediately called the families of the wounded and assigned two other senior managers to notify the families of the deceased. She also arranged for a friend of each of the deceased coworkers to accompany each of the managers. She took care of numerous administrative details, such as authorizing expenditures for additional resources, signing forms, and making decisions about such matters as granting leave to coworkers. (In this case, the police evacuated the building, and employees were told by the Assistant Director that they could go home for the rest of the day but that they were expected to return to duty the following day.)

To ensure a coordinated response effort, she made sure that agency personnel involved in the crisis had cell phones for internal communication while conducting their duties in various offices around the building.

Security Staff – The security staff assisted the police with numerous activities, such as evacuating the building.

Assignment

Based on the incident above, please answer the following questions. Responses should be no less than three pages (double-spaced and include APA in-text citations and references):

Please submit to the assignment lesson.

1. Describe the Critical Incident Stress Management Process.
2. How would you utilize the seven phases of the Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) in this incident?
3. Is a debriefing warranted for this type of incident? If so, how would Critical Incident Stress Defusing be utilized in this situation to help?