ABSTRACT
Organisations need to be able to assess the magnitude and range of the psychological harm suffered by employees exposed to a traumatic event at work. This assessment will enable them to meet their duty of care by identifying which employees require psychological help and to make sure that appropriate psychological support and treatment is provided. Organisations also need to be able to monitor employees at intervals following the incident to identify any delayed trauma responses and to track the effectiveness of the treatment and rehabilitation programme. In this chapter, the development and validation of a traumatic stress questionnaire, the Extended Impact of Events Scale (IES-E) is described. The IES-E was created for use with traumatised employees and is an extension to the Impact of Events Scale (IES) (Horowitz et al. 1979), taking the 15 items from the original scale and adding 8 new items to measure arousal symptoms. Four studies are described in which the structure, reliability and discriminant validity of the extended scale are established. The studies use data gathered from traumatised employees who had been exposed to a range of traumatic incidents including armed raids, serious threats and physical assaults.
