The week of December 9th to 13th was a busy and important one for the team at Lifeline Ukraine. We welcomed to Kyiv one of the world’s leading experts in suicide prevention through call centre operations, Dr. April Naturale, to help us to build our skills as we continue to learn from best international practices.

Dr. Naturale has over 30 years of experience in this field, and the time that she spent helped the team to further develop their abilities to identify and address suicidal tendencies and more. The “more” part was that we made sure to include in the training agenda a module on self care. Yes, Lifeline Ukraine is here to provide care and comfort to callers, but for us to be able to do this, we have to be well in ourselves also.

This training session was extremely important and came as we were celebrating two months since we began our operations, as one of the consultants in the team said to me before the training started, “we now know what kind of questions to ask” and “we have experience of various situations that we can ask for help with” and we were often left amazed by the way Dr. Naturale was able to quickly and calmly come up with solid answers to some of the things we put to her.

Without doubt Lifeline Ukraine is better positioned to be able to help those who call us now, and April is now a part of the history of this organisation, her lessons will stay with us for many years and will literally help us to save many more lives as we continue our mission. At the same time, we are personally better equipped too to manage the stresses and challenges of the work we do.

Our duty of care is twofold. To those in need of support who call 7333, and to our colleagues who are taking the calls.

Paul Niland