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The Assaultive Staff Action Program (ASAP): Thirty Year Program Analysis

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Abstract

The Assaulted Staff Action Program (ASAP) is a voluntary, system-wide, peer-help, crisis intervention program to address the psychological sequellae in staff victims of patient assaults. Its functions and service provisions have been reported in previous five-year intervals. ASAP has been associated with providing quality counseling services to employee victims of these patient assaults as well as declines in assaults facility-wide in some agencies after an ASAP team was fielded. The present paper presents a summary of both its most recent five-year interval (2015–2020) and an overview of its 30 years of service during which it has responded to 10,651 patient assaults on staff.

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Acknowledgments

This paper represents the collective efforts of all of the ASAP team leaders, ASAP supervisors, first-responders, and support personnel. I want to recognize and thank each of them for their important contributions to the ASAP program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Raymond B. Flannery Jr

  2. Department of Psychiatry, The University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA

    Raymond B. Flannery Jr

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge Health Alliance, 1493 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Raymond B. Flannery Jr

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  1. Raymond B. Flannery Jr
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Correspondence to Raymond B. Flannery Jr.

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Flannery, R.B. The Assaultive Staff Action Program (ASAP): Thirty Year Program Analysis. Psychiatr Q 91, 1011–1015 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-020-09785-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-020-09785-8

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