Two years ago, the Georgetown Scott County EMS team started a critical incident team to provide mental health resources to its paramedics.

Now, the program serves multiple agencies within Scott County, including the fire department and the coroner's office.

First responders say they have experienced a stigma around mental health in their field, but the Critical incident team is helping to make a difference.

That's tonight's medical news.

On May 22nd, 2023, we, Scott County lost, Deputy Caleb Conley.

And I really violent line of duty.

Death and that kind of brought attention to, mental health and mental well-being for first responders and especially for those who worked the incident.

We saw that there wasn't really, a huge list of resources for first responders when it comes to mental health and dealing with hard calls and even just day to day life.

And then recently, we saw a greater need for all the first responders in the county, not just EMS.

We are made up of EMS, police, fire, sheriff's department, coroner's office, dispatch and, some local hospital.

We, of course, want to be a part of it because we all our brothers and sisters here in emergency services, whether you've done this for five minutes or 15 years, you have experienced things in your career that are very traumatic.

And you either hold on to it or you have to have a, an out and you have to have a way to deal with those emotions.

And so, being a part of this team allows us to help each other take care of each other and make sure that we don't have any burnout and reduce the amount of burnout and, make sure that we're all providi The human brain is really only wired and meant to to witness and survive 1 to 3 traumatic events in their lifetime.

And first responders.

We can see double or triple that in a shift, just kind of depending on how the day goes.

And then there's been this big stigma that, you know, we're the tough ones, like if you are having a if you had a hard call or whatever.

Get over it and move on to the next one.

But then that's led to a lot of, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety.

And we've even lost several first responders.

Not necessarily here in Scott County, but throughout the state of Kentucky, to death by suicide.

Because of of what we see and and not being able to deal with it, we can provide, incident debrief.

So, like, hard calls, wrecks, fires, pediatrics are typically really hard on first responders.

There's a tough pediatric call.

And so we can do, incident debriefs.

We also provide peer support.

So if somebody is just like, hey, I'm having a really hard time, I want to speak one on one and kind of an informal setting.

All of our members are either trained or getting trained in peer support as well.

It's been pushed to me that when I was very young that, hey, we're tough, we're we're strong, we can do this.

You know, you hold it down, you don't.

We don't deal with it out, out in the open.

Well, that's just not true.

I think people are finally starting to realize that, we're first responders are also human.

And I think first responders are starting to realize, like, hey, we are we are still human.

At the end of the day.

We also have to take care of ourselves.

It's really hard to take care of other people if we're not taking care of ourselves.

Very true.

The multi-agency Critical Incident Team had its first meeting earlier this month.