Staff Safety Awareness Training
Kurt Zinkan CSW III, C.Y.O.C.
The mandate of this training is to remind workers that their safety is important and awareness of potential
threat is essential when working with clients.Working in the field of Corrections, where safety should be an ongoing evaluation process, how often do we evaluate our personal safety needs? Those of us, who work in an institutional setting or a community-based correctional office, will eventuallydeal with offenders who pose a potential threat to our personal physical safety.
Working within a correctional setting, we should deem safety a priority in our daily practices. As correctional workers grow more comfortable dealing with offenders, complacency may set in. With complacency may come a relaxation of personal safety practices. Through familiarity, we may lower our attention to detail and stop looking for signs of potential threat.
An evaluation of youth correctional workers was created, in effort to determine staff levels of training and planning, in relation to preparedness of a physical threat. After evaluating over two hundred staff working within a youth correctional environment, the
conclusion was that most staff members have varying degrees of self defence training, and spend little time planning for the “what would I do if?” scenario. Directly as a result of the evaluation, staff safety awareness training was developed in September 2005.
This training addresses developing individual action plans. These plans are specific to individual skill levels, size, age and gender. Course participants learn provincial policy related to “Use of Force”, to recognize a threat before physical assault occurs, to safely interview a person; office space design to maximize safety, environmental awareness
and what to do when confronted by an aggressive client.
The mandate of this training is to remind workers that their safety is important and awareness of potential threat is essential when working with clients. Staff Safety Awareness training will inform workers how to develop a pre-planned response for reacting to aggressive offenders. Staff Safety Awareness training will allow for diversity in application with minimal amount of skill development.