Republic of Korea - A Training for Trainers in Psychological First Aid (PFA) took place this week (13-17/2) in Seoul. It was designed to strengthen Korean humanitarian workers’ response capacity to psychological injury caused by emergencies. The training was attended by 100 participants from the government, local NGOs, academics and psychiatric institutions.

PFA is not yet extensively used as part of the humanitarian response, despite the fact that the emotional impacts caused by emergencies strongly influence not only the affected population, but also humanitarian staff responding to the emergency.

The five-day training focused on PFA and Staff Care principles, sharing lessons learned from case studies.

It was funded by the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and led by two psychosocial support experts – Dr. Leslie Snider, a global psychosocial consultant in Peace in Practice and Ryoko Ohtaki Narita, an associate researcher at Japan’s National Information Center of Disaster Mental Health.

“This is the second time IOM ROK hosted a workshop on psychological support. We hope that this training helps them to facilitate a comprehensive approach to take care of a complexity of psychological impact of disasters,” Said Miah Park, Head of Office at IOM ROK.

IOM’s mission in the Republic of Korea (ROK) previously organized an International Workshop on Psychosocial Support and Staff Care in Emergencies in 2016.

For further information, please contact at IOM ROK, Jumi Kim, Tel: +82 (0)70 4820 2324, Email: jukim@iom.int or Seonyoung Lee, Tel: +82 (0)70 4820 2784, Email: selee@iom.int