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Social Work at the FDNY By Dianne Kane, DSW, Assistant Director, FDNY Counseling Service Unit (September 2002)In a social work career that has encompassed direct practice, supervision, administration and teaching, never before have I felt as challenged or as privileged as over the last year. As the Assistant Director of FDNY's Counseling Service Unit (CSU), the challenge of providing service to the families of our 343 deceased members as well as addressing the needs of a 16,000 person workforce and their families was daunting. What follows is a brief description of how an internal, all be it non-traditional, Employee Assistance Program (EAP) staffed on September 10,2001 by 11 counselors (5 civillian/6 uniform) continues to evolve to meet this challenge. It goes without saying that the first hours and days were chaotic. As information trickled in, the enormity of our losses became known. Just as individuals become more of who they are in times of crisis so too, do organizations. Finding ways to build on pre-existing strengths was critical to success. Our history of mixing mental health civilian staff with trained uniform counselors served us well during this time. The social work community, along with other mental health professionals, volunteered countless pro bono hours. At the same time, under the FEMA umbrella, teams of trained crisis responders, including many social workers and fire fighter/EMS peers, arrived to help. While local help offered many long term advantages, the fact that visitors arrived in organized, pre-screened teams eliminated many of the time consuming administrative issues involved in an attempt to respond, screen and utilize local offers. (This has possible implications for how the social work community might prepare differently for the future) One of the most difficult challenges early on was to pull myself out of the day-to-day response in order to begin to plan. Learning to utilize the visiting help effectively involved creating a space to think ahead. While in hindsight this appears to be Administration 101, at the time it was quite difficult. When in doubt, I have always found Social Work's basic tenet "start where the client is at" to be useful, if not profound. But, who was the client….the organization? the victim's families? the survivors? all of the above? All groups were important, all groups had needs, how to deploy current staff while adding to it was extremely important. An age-old EAP question kept emerging: What should CSU do itself; what to refer out? Social Work teaches us to consider needs in the context of culture and environment. The unique culture of FDNY needed to be understood and respected in planning any response. This had always impacted the structure and practice of CSU as a non-traditional EAP, resulting in our providing a level of direct service not typical of workplace practice. The degree to which the organization thinks of itself as family, cares for it's own and historically responded to line of duty death needed to be understood by any responders. Attitudes and stigma about mental health services needed to be acknowledged and addressed. As is typical of all cultures, CSU believed it could provide the most culturally sensitive and relevant services to our members and their families. When this was not possible or practical we sought as much involvement in selecting and training those who would be involved as possible. A guiding principle over this year has been to develop programs that are accessible to home and work, are user friendly; address identified needs and are sustainable over time. With this goal in mind our primary response included the following service components:
Presenting problems of Critical Incident Stress; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Grief; Depression; Chemical Dependency and Survivor Guilt are addressed in our clinical programs by individual, family and group modalities. In addition to our 5 offices, clients can be referred to private clinicians at no out of pocket cost. This same range of services is available to the family members of our personnel. We continue to anticipate and forecast needs on a weekly and monthly basis. Recognizing the impact on marriages reported after Oklahoma and Viet Nam we have developed a weekend program of workshops and respite for FDNY couples. We are beginning to think about the needs of the many members who may be retiring within the coming months. We comment on a daily basis about the changes that have occurred for all of us, we try and continue to find time to cook a meal and eat together as is the tradition in the firehouse.
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