Debriefing and psychological triage in crisis intervention: A review

Abstract

The aim of this work is to give a review of the main strategies to intervene in crises and of the psychological triage procedures. The debriefing is described as a way of intervention in crises, developed to prevent personal breakdowns, traumatic stress or PTSD. It is noticed that in the psychological triage of emergencies there is a lack of homogeneous criterions so that the intervention is scheduled depending on the direct observation of a set of signs related to an unbalancing or to significant stress. In this work a set of recommendations is proposed to allow to implement an operative triage process, which allows to identify those people that require an immediate assistance as well as the priority order to be followed.