When a serious incident happens at work, the focus is often on the event itself — what went wrong, who did what, and how to prevent it next time. But what happens to the staff member at the centre of it?
David Blocksidge, an expert on witness error and trauma, has spent years studying what happens to people after critical incidents — and what organisations can do to protect them.
What the Course Covers
The Safeguarding Employees After Incidents course is designed to give organisations the tools to support staff in the critical hours and days following a traumatic event.
What we’ve tried to do is incorporate what’s known from critical-incident training and post-incident training — how an affected individual may have reacted during the event, what their expectation should be about justifying their actions through memory — and then provide statement writing support to help professionally manage those immediate hours after the event.
Memory, Stress, and Writing Better Evidence
One of the core components is raising awareness around how memory works under stress — and how acute stress impacts retrieval. The goal isn’t just more detail; it’s better detail.
💡 Key takeaway: The course focuses on quality over quantity in statement writing. A good, tight, accurate account protects the staff member’s legal position far better than pages of unfiltered recall.
Participants learn simple, practical ways to support a colleague who has been through an incident — helping them produce clearer, more reliable evidence without adding to their stress.
The Longer-Term Picture
Beyond the immediate aftermath, the course looks at how traumatic events play out over time — through internal reviews, legal processes, and the personal toll on the individual.
Peer-to-peer support mechanisms are a key part of the solution. Having someone trained and available in-house makes a measurable difference.
⚠️ The hidden risk: Many organisations underestimate the support their staff will need after a critical incident — not through malice, but through lack of awareness. One of the biggest benefits of this course is simply making people aware of what can happen, and what help looks like.
Perhaps the biggest benefit that teams get from a training course about Safeguarding Employees After Incidents is to have some trained people available within your organisation — so that, should one of these events happen, they would be the immediate go-to people that can support staff.
For more information about this training course: Safeguarding Employees After Incidents