The Assaulted Staff Action Program (ASAP): ten year empirical support for critical incident stress management (CISM)

Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) refers to an integrated comprehensive, multicomponent, crisis intervention approach for addressing the psychological aftermath of critical incidents. It includes pre-incident training, acute crisis intervention, and post-incident responses. The Assaulted Staff Action Program (ASAP) is a voluntary, system-wide, peer-help, crisis intervention program for staff victims of patient assaults. ASAP is a CISM approach, and this paper evaluated fourteen empirical studies of ASAP to assess the empirical justification for ASAP and CISM approaches, which demonstrated a 25%-62% reduction in staff assaults.