Geriatric Mental Health Disaster and Emergency Preparedness

Chapter 6 Supervision and Facilitated Refl ective Practice 109
der to overcome this phenomenon, it is essential each professional understand
the perspectives of the other professionals in the team. Reframing
perspectives by focusing on the task can help practitioners to explore
new viewpoints and agree on practice interventions. Schön (1987, p. 128)
describes this process as the “capacity for framed reflection.”
As groups and teams meet to develop professional, interprofessional,
and collaborative services that will be sensitive to the particular needs of
older adults caught up in civil emergencies and disasters, reflection on the
group processes of working together in the here and now can be a rich
source for understanding diverse strengths in the team, as well as possible
pitfalls and barriers to effective service provision. In the processes of service
delivery, the what-goes-on-in-here mirrors or is a parallel course to
the what-goes-on-out-there. For example, a team experiencing anxiety
about a forecast of severe weather is reflecting and acting out the anxiety
also present in the community they serve.
Planning for and responding to disasters demands flexible responses
to those in need. Procedure- and/or protocol-led responses that do little
to deliver a service to individuals can stifle creative approaches to practice
that consider the needs of individuals or groups with common or shared
experience. The authors suggest that such inelastic systems are more likely
to produce off-task behaviors such as basic assumption mentalities (Bion,
1961), the unconscious tendency to avoid work on a primary task, particularly
when providing care to vulnerable groups where the emotional impact
might be more intense.
The use of the reflective practice technique ensures that practitioners
from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities respond sensitively to the
needs of individuals and communities, rather than creating procedures
that result in a one-size-fits-all response. Therefore, the particular needs of
older adults are more likely to be acknowledged and addressed. By adopting
this model, unconscious processes, beliefs, attitudes, stereotypes, and
values and their influence on practice in disasters can be uncovered and
explored. It also provides an excellent opportunity to highlight incompatible
interprofessional and international structures, priorities, and procedures
that could potentially result in conflicting actions when responding
to disasters.
This technique has been used by the authors to assist their students
in developing insight and considering how their individual practice fits
with the primary task of their home organization and with the delivery of
true, interprofessional services to clients caught up in violent episodes.
As a result of their own work with students in master’s programs delivering
services to victims of intentional, interpersonal acts of violence such