The OPP recognizes that its members are often witness to or participants in critical or traumatic events that can have a devastating impact upon their professional and personal lives. The employee assistance program was created several years ago to provide confidential peer support and when necessary referral to medical and mental health professionals. It has evolved into a well respected program that offers employees support that extends beyond free psychological and counselling services.

The OPP currently has 6 teams of trained Critical Incident Stress Responders (CISR) deployed throughout the province in our regions and HQ's bureaus. Each member of the team is selected based upon their personal experience with critical incidents, empathy, compassion, ability to maintain confidentiality and credibility with others. If selected they must meet the desired characteristics through an evaluation by our Force Psychologist, Dr. Denis Lapalme and then are trained in the Mitchell model of Critical Incident Stress response. Upon successful completion, the member is assigned to a team in their geographic region. They must undergo annual training and actively participate in the program to remain on the team.

CISR members respond to any incident that might cause our employees to experience unusually strong emotional or physical reactions. Examples of these incidents include but are not limited to, life or career threatening injuries, line of duty death or serious injury of a co-worker, being subjected to gunfire or very nearly taking someone's life, death or serious injury of a citizen associated with their actions, disaster or multi-casualty incident, suicide, death or serious injury of children and any highly emotional event deemed to be critical by the persons involved. The team members attend the scene and offer support to the involved employees and often other agencies to deal with any negative or adverse reactions they may experience. They are usually accompanied by the force psychologist or a local professional to oversee the de-briefings. Team members are often sought out by employees for confidential, one on one discussion concerning personal or professional situations affecting them. Often, a plan of action is arrived at this level that will assist the employee to deal with the circumstances they are facing. The employees are also encouraged to utilize the confidential external provider of assistance, Family Guidance Inc that provides free counselling and immediate referal 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition to the CISR teams, members who meet the selection criteria and have been involved in a shooting, stabbing or victim of extreme violence comprise the Trauma Support Team. Their experience and peer support for police officers and families exposed to or victim of severely traumatic incidents such as these is invaluable in assisting the healing process after an event.

The CISR team was actively involved in the Georgian Express aircraft crash that occurred off of Pelee Island on January 17th, 2004 providing support to the members involved as well as families of the victims. Exposure to a tragedy of this severity has the potential to incur severe and lasting emotional trauma to any member involved, civilian and sworn. Given the scope of the crash, the CISR team worked in a cohesive and professional fashion with partners in the local mental health area, Salvation Army, Windsor Regional Hospital chaplaincy and Victim Services of Windsor-Essex county to assist the families and employees involved. This is but one example of the situations that our CISR teams respond to locally, regionally and provincially.

The Essex County OPP detachment has one member assigned to the Critical Incident Stress Response team and he has been utilized throughout the region and local area for the past five years. He is trained in the Mitchell model of Critical Incident Stress Response as well as the Nova method used by the Windsor Police and Victim Services agencies.