The State of Crisis Prevention and Intervention Training and What It Means for Your Staff

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans’ mental health has been negatively impacted in several ways. The rates of anxiety and depression in the U.S. have grown considerably, leading many experts to worry about a potential rise in crisis situations such as suicidal ideation, overdoses, and domestic violence. The ability of your staff to mitigate various types of crises has never been more important. The performance of your staff members, however, is closely linked to the quality of training they receive. The multifaceted challenges that human services organizations have contended with over the last several years have only further accentuated the importance of strategic planning for crisis prevention and intervention training.

To gain insight into the current state of training for crisis prevention and intervention among behavioral health professionals, Relias conducted a survey among 8,801 human services professionals.

Here, we’ll review the high-level insights on crisis prevention, intervention, and postvention training that this survey yielded to help learning and development leaders improve how they train their staff to mitigate crisis situations.

What we mean by crisis management

Before we analyze the results of the survey, let’s quickly define key terms we’ll use throughout the article. In our survey, we questioned participants on training across various types of crisis prevention, intervention, and postvention techniques, and how their organizations facilitate crisis prevention and intervention training.

We differentiate these techniques as follows:

• Prevention — stopping the crisis before it happens — for example, counseling a child whose parents are going through divorce proceedings and helping them to navigate their emotions through the process.
• Intervention — mitigating a crisis situation so that it does not continue to escalate or cause permanent damage to the individual experiencing crisis — for example, effectively providing verbal de-escalation to someone threatening to harm themselves.
• Postvention — an organized response following a crisis to ensure that those affected get the care they need — for example, working with a client who survived a suicide attempt, and helping them to address the issues that led to their crisis experience.

The way that behavioral health professionals implement these crisis techniques can have a huge impact on the well-being of clients. To that end, it is crucial to ensure proper training around crisis prevention, intervention, and postvention techniques.

What our survey uncovered about crisis training

Our survey which informed the 2024 Behavioral Health Crisis Management Training Report uncovered some interesting trends across the human services industry, most notably:

• Most respondents use crisis prevention and intervention skills in their primary roles on a regular basis, yet only receive training on these skills once a year.
• Online training, especially blended learning, is a popular method of enhancing crisis management skills and increasing staff confidence.
• Respondents who are trained in crisis management skill sets more than once a year reported the highest percentage (14%) of “extremely confident” responses when asked how confident they feel in these skill sets, yet a majority (69%) only receive training on these skills once a year.

Let’s look at each of these points in greater detail.

Roles and expertise

Before we can effectively gauge the role that crisis prevention and intervention training plays among behavioral health professionals, we have to understand how they practice crisis management in their roles. To that end, we asked respondents if crisis prevention, intervention, and/or postvention make up part of their duties.

A majority (65%) of survey respondents indicated that crisis prevention constituted part of their primary roles. Despite the importance of these skills to their job, however, most respondents reported that they only receive training on crisis topics once a year.

This is interesting as research has shown that more frequent training leads to greater information retention.

Crisis prevention and intervention training options

Though most respondents only receive crisis prevention and intervention training once per year, the high demand for these skills in today’s workforce has led to a variety of training modalities becoming available.

While an organization’s training choice depends on a variety of factors, most respondents reported that their organization uses some form of online training most of the time. For example, of those respondents trained in crisis management, 88% received blended learning, 23% received online pre-recorded learning, and 21% received online live learning. This means that 73% of respondents trained on this topic received some portion of their training online.

This trend held true across all training topics, as the majority of crisis prevention and intervention topics were taught via some element of online training, whether it be online live training, online e-learning, or a blend of live training and online training.

Additionally, a majority of respondents indicated that in order to increase their confidence in their crisis prevention and intervention skills, they would want more practice of these skills, more continuing education opportunities, and a wider variety of training options.

Skills and confidence

To understand how staff members incorporate what they learn during their crisis prevention and intervention training, we asked respondents how they practice crisis prevention, intervention, and postvention.

Crisis prevention and intervention

Similar to TIC, 54% of respondents reported feeling very to extremely confident in their crisis prevention skills, while 39% reported feeling moderately confident. To break this down further, 39% reported feeling very confident and 15% reported feeling extremely confident. Interestingly, when we compare this data to the behavioral health respondents in our 2022 survey, we find that the number of respondents reporting being very to extremely confident has gone down (54% in 2024 vs. 63% in 2022) and those reporting moderate confidence has gone up (39% in 2024 vs. 32% in 2022).

When we then compare these confidence levels with the data we gathered on how respondents have their crisis training delivered, we found that 52% of respondents who received their training via an external, online asynchronous (prerecorded) format reported being very to extremely confident in their crisis prevention skills.

Crisis postvention

To wrap up our evaluation of the crisis management spectrum, we asked respondents how confident they are in their crisis postvention skills. The most common response was moderately confident (45%), with 41% reporting that they were very to extremely confident. Here again, we find that as respondents move farther away from the point of crisis, their confidence in their crisis management skills ebbs.

When we compare this confidence data to how respondents are trained in crisis management topics, we see a similar trend to what we uncovered in the above section on crisis prevention and intervention. Respondents who received training more than once per year were the most likely to report being very to extremely confident in their crisis postvention skills.

Take your crisis prevention training to the next step

To help you as a leader in human services develop a training plan to meet the crisis prevention and intervention training needs of your staff, we’ve put together the following recommendations.

• Increase the frequency of training. While the majority of human services organizations require crisis prevention and intervention training at least once annually, Relias found that increasing the frequency of crisis prevention and intervention training positively impacts provider confidence in their crisis management skills. Additionally, consider offering staff greater access to training in particular aspects of crisis prevention and intervention, such as suicide prevention, trauma-informed care, and verbal de-escalation of crises.
• Perform more blended learning. Respondents continually reported online-based learning as their most used means of training, with blended learning often ranking as the most common modality. Blended learning offers your staff access to a wider variety of training options, as the online portion of these trainings can involve live or pre-recorded lectures, quizzes to increase information retention, and more.
• Consider simulation courses. Similar to blended learning, simulation courses can help your staff gain access to wider varieties of training, while also giving them a safe, risk-free environment in which to practice newly learned skills. Indeed, respondents continuously told us that more practice of the skills they learn in crisis prevention and intervention training would help to improve their confidence. Simulation courses can do just that.