About Us

ABOUT US

First responders encounter unique professional stressors. These professions require a person to possess a myriad of skills and personality traits and to use them in a variety of challenging and sometimes threatening situations. As a result there are many well-known statistics demonstrating the dramatic impact to first responders that have become known as the “cost of doing business” in this industry.

Fortunately, our understanding of the unique stresses and strains inherent in law enforcement has increased over the last couple of decades and several profession-specific protocols have been developed. Psychological services are essential for first responders if an organization wishes to safeguard the social, emotional and physical well being of its most important asset: its employees. In today’s financial and political climate of “less is more,” career sustainability begins to fail as worker’s compensation, insufficient resources and public liability skyrocket. The Public Safety Family Counseling Group can help you create programs and present trainings to combat liability related to personnel, increase employee effectiveness, as well as ensuring that your agency is able to meet the standard of care for your employees when a critical incident occurs.

What We Do

Public Safety Family Counseling Group (PSFCG) offers a variety of services to agencies including:

• Critical Incident Response
• Critical Incident Stress Debriefings (CISD)
• Development of Crisis Intervention and Peer Support Policies
• Selection, Training and Supervision of Peer Support Teams
• Trauma After-care to impacted personnel
• Short-term therapy services to officers and their spouses
• Advanced Officer Training in a variety of subjects (see below)
• Resource Identification and Referral for longer term counseling
• Organizational Consultation
• Officer Remediation Assistance

Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) services are preventative in nature and represent the standard of care in the industry for officer-involved shootings and other operational crisis. They are designed to reduce disruptive arousal, increase productivity, enhance employee wellbeing and facilitate a rapid return to “normalcy” in affected personnel.

Our CISM Response services follow the International Critical Incident Foundation which is the standard of care in the industry. We guarantee 24-hour, 7 day-a-week availability for agencies contracted with PSFCG. PSFCG provides expert consultation in critical incidents and disaster deployment.

We provide selection, training and clinical oversight for your in-house peer support team. CISM services are the backbone of a healthy organization in this high-risk field. PSFCG provides the additional benefit of mutual aid from other law enforcement Peer Support Teams throughout Northern California should the need arise.

In thinking about the answer to the question of why Public Safety Family Counseling Group is the best choice for CISM and Peer Support training and response services, I would direct your attention first to our motto, “Dedicated Service to Those Who Serve” and second to our practice of exclusive service to this singular segment of the population. Our 30 plus years of established response and support to public safety professions speaks to an unparalleled history of experience, expertise, and excellence in the delivery of comprehensive support programs to organizations who are on the razor’s edge of stress exposure due to both chronic and acute stressors encountered on the job. While it is critical to provide treatment and support after personnel are injured, common wisdom dictates that prevention of such injury is not only more humane but makes sound fiscal sense as well.

We also contend that any meaningful discussion of law enforcement reform must start with the premise that we can only expect success if we are providing proper training and support to those who face the awesome mandate of public trust. Further, the science supports the notion that law enforcement professionals are facing unsustainable levels of stress as public opinion has condemned the entire industry in the face of tragic events that have been broadcast into a wholesale indictment of the men and women who honorably wear the badge and selflessly serve their communities. Recent research underscores the commonly accepted belief that the longer a problem exists the harder it is to solve. Critical Incident Stress Management embraces comprehensive stress management training and support across the spectrum of the first responder’s career to enhance resiliency and performance under the extraordinary demands of the job. We endorse this philosophy of Stress Prevention and Wellness training as the key to sustainability in these high impact career fields.

The team of clinicians and peers at the Public Safety Family Counseling Group bring a wealth of experience gained from over 30 years of crisis response to law enforcement agencies. Our response has included far too many line-of-duty deaths, the tragic loss of personnel to suicide, extensive crisis response to officer’s exposure to shootings, injured children, and other trauma than can even be counted. We have assisted numerous agencies in establishing Peer Support Programs that create a fail safe for public safety personnel in need of care. We have developed and presented hundreds of hours of training with the goal of providing resources for this profession to claim control of their own wellbeing and not only survive but thrive in this exceptionally challenging environment.