Non-Violent Crisis Prevention/Intervention

  Instructor, Connie Shaut

Certification to be renewed every 6 months

Managing crisis situations

After striking a teacher, an angry adolescent threatens to return with a gun. A psychiatric patient smashes her fist through a window. A youth in a residential program brutally attacks another resident. A social worker abruptly ends a home visit because the client becomes so verbally abusive, he fears for his safety.

Crisis situations. Those moments when irrationality, fear, and chaos seem to consume your
efforts to provide therapy, education, and rehabilitation. Although frightening and at times dangerous, well-managed crisis situations can be opportunities for growth.

Background and philosophy

Opportunities for growth form a cornerstone of the Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® training program, established in 1980 by the Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI), located in Brookfield, Wisconsin. The Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® training program is the foundation of CPI and is considered to be the worldwide standard for the safe management of disruptive and assaultive behavior. This highly successful training program has benefited more than 5.4 million human service professionals from thousands of hospitals, schools, residential programs, mental health facilities, correctional facilities, businesses, and other organizations. Tens of thousands of professionals have used CPI's training resources in order to make working environments safer for staff and those in their charge.

The training

Through participation in this program, you gain a practical, common-sense approach for identifying behaviors that can escalate into full-blown crises. Using these behaviors as a framework, the training program focuses on prevention, stepping you through a series of simple yet powerful nonverbal and verbal techniques that enable you to effectively defuse mounting hostility. Nonviolent Crisis Intervention^® training demonstrates how you can use empathic listening skills, verbal intervention strategies, and limit-setting techniques to calm hostile and agitated individuals.

If verbal hostility turns into physical aggression, the safe, organized approach to intervention presented in this program shows you when—and how—to use physical intervention to maximize the safety of all involved. As a professional, you can benefit from guidelines on forming crisis response teams, breaking up fights, and determining when to use physical intervention. You also learn how to re-establish communication with the individual after the crisis is over, thereby creating the opportunity for constructive change to occur.

Visit www.crisisprevention.com to discover what millions of professionals already know: There are ways to defuse situations so that violence is avoided and understanding is achieved. It's all in the training.