The impact of psychological first aid training on the providers: a systematic review

The consensus is that psychological first aid is a practical, early psychosocial intervention to mitigate the distress caused by disasters. This review aimed to investigate PFA training’s efficacy in the existing studies and evaluate these programs’ impact on trainees.

MEDLINE (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD), EMBASE (Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands), PsycInfo (American Psychological Association, Washington, DC), and Cochrane Library (John Wiley & Sons, Hobken, NJ, USA) were searched on August 1, 2020 without language and date limitation. The Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for randomized controlled trials and the Risk of Bias in Non-Randomized Studies - of Interventions (ROBINS-I) (Cochrane, London, UK) were used to assess the quality of the studies included. SPSS (IBM Corp., Endicott, NY, USA) was used for descriptive, comparative, and correlational summaries.

From 376 articles, only 9 studies met the criteria and were included after screening. The most common outcome was knowledge improvement, followed by increased confidence, and competence. Other outcomes encompassed Attitude, preparedness, and therapeutic engagement.

PFA is the most suggested early intervention aftermath and could be acquired by professionals and non-professionals in the mental health area. Nonetheless, to obtain the desired outcome, PFA training programs’ quality is vital. This review revealed that most training programs’ duration was short, without scenario-based interactions and post-training supervisions. More controlled trials are required to measure the effectiveness of PFA training on the providers.