Debriefing
[1] As a technical term, it implies a specific and active intervention process that has developed with more formal meanings such as operational debriefing.
[2] Effective debriefings typically include the following essential elements:[3] Throughout the existence of combat and the history of war, engaging with the emotional and psychological impact on soldiers has been an ongoing and conflicting conversation.
[8] There is a growing belief that allowing soldiers to reflect and problem-solve as a group builds their relationship with each other over time and ultimately, their effectiveness as a unit.
Conclusively, in order to make the role of a soldier more sustainable, captains and group leaders must prioritize debriefing strategies to focus more on the whole person.
Ernesto Yturralde, experiential trainer and researcher, explains: "In the field of experiential learning methodology, the debriefing is a semi-structured process by which the facilitator, once a certain activity is accomplished, makes a series of progressive questions in this session, with an adequate sequence that let the participants reflect what happened, giving important insights with the aim of that project towards the future, linking the challenge with the actions and the future.
[18] Critical Incident Stress Debriefing is a crisis intervention program that is used to provide initial psychosocial relief to rescue workers.
Researchers Mayou, Ehlers and Hobbs in 2000 were interested in evaluating the 3-year results of a randomized controlled trial of debriefing for consecutive subjects admitted to the hospital following a traffic accident.
The patients were assessed in the hospital using the Impact of Event Scale (IES), Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and a questionnaire, and were then reassessed at 3 years and 3 months.
Debriefing is typically not used in surveys, observational studies, or other forms of research that involve no deception and minimal risk to participants.
Methodological advantages of a debriefing include "the ability of researchers to check the effectiveness of a manipulation, or to identify participants who were able to guess the hypothesis or spot a deception.
The main reason for focusing on debriefing in an organizational or even in a project management capacity, is to increase effectiveness of the team, both individually and collectively.
One study found that properly conducted debriefings can help organizations realize individual and team performance improvements by about 20-25%.
Digital tools have emerged aiming to automate the preparation of a debriefing session, based on the anonymous answers to questions asked of individual team members.
[32] Self-facilitated after action reviews (AAR) or debriefings are common in small unit and crew activities, and in a training context are shown to improve Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) significantly when conducted formally using pre-defined measures of performance derived from front-end analysis.
Typically the structure will use: Temporal, Spatial, Objective, and/or Performance derived markers to bring focus to a specific activity.
Debriefings in the health care field are becoming increasingly popular and more widely used after claims of malpractice in emergency departments were reviewed and over 50 cases examined that showed how a high-performing team could have eliminated or mitigated major problems including death and impairments.
