Rewind technique for trauma in ambulance staff

Ambulance service staff are the likeliest to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of all the emergency services (Stevelink et al, 2020). Although there are reported improvements in the culture around mental health in UK ambulance services (MIND, 2019), barriers remain to accessing help. Examples include staff being reluctant to seek help through their employers, the financial cost of paying privately, and the opinion that talking about traumatic events is either unlikely to help, or too distressing (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), 2018).

The rewind technique for trauma is a brief psychological intervention, which aims to resolve symptoms of PTSD in as few as three sessions. It involves the therapist coaching a client through imagining watching a film of the traumatic event, so that they dissociate from it, then imagining that they are in the film at the end, before being rewound at great speed back to the start, before the event happened (Adams and Allan, 2018).