Cultural Competence for Working with Emergency Workers

To express your interest in gaining access to this training, please visit this page and submit your contact details. 

If you are currently treating an emergency service worker from the agencies represented in Responder Assist a coupon code will be provided for free access to the course. Clinicians with an interest outside the scope of Responder Assist are invited to contact Phoenix Australia through this link to discuss access options.

This course is designed for mental health practitioners who would like to develop their core cultural competencies for working with emergency workers. This course will help practitioners appreciate the complexity and dynamic quality of emergency worker culture, become more competent in incorporating emergency worker cultural competency into assessment and treatment, and be more likely to respect and appreciate the qualities of emergency workers.

Please note that while this course explores the core cultural competencies for mental health practitioners working with Emergency Workers, it also provides detailed information for mental health practitioners working with Vic SES and Victoria Police members. Material focusing on developing cultural competence for work with other agencies will be added over time, and announcements will be made as this occurs.

The aims of this course are to: 

• Introduce core cultural competencies for mental health practitioners who work with emergency workers
• Orient practitioners to the culture and subcultures of emergency workers
• Detail some of the unique stressors and pressures of emergency work that bring emergency workers to therapy
• Contribute to practitioner case formulation, thereby improving your mental health treatment of emergency workers.

After taking this course practitioners will be able to:

• Work with emergency workers in a more culturally competent way
• Have more knowledge about the core values of emergency workers
• Have more knowledge about the functions and roles of emergency work agencies in Victoria, and specifically of the seven emergency agencies participating in Responder Assist
• Understand unique stressors and pressures associated with each emergency work agencies
• Understand the barriers and facilitators to engaging emergency workers in therapy
• Apply the core competencies of culturally competent care with emergency workers to your case formulation and treatment planning.