With ever increasing proportion of humanitarian crisis, the role of humanitarian workers becomes more challenging. Disaster can affect anyone but situation becomes more vulnerable when physical loss is clubbed with severe psychological turmoil.

The Role of humanitarian workers becomes more challenging in the new times due to the ever increasing trend of humanitarian crisis.

Caritas India conducted evaluation of its 10 years disaster intervention to gauge the long-term impact from the beneficiary side. The finding highlighted great impact in terms of rehabilitation and infrastructure but also highlighted the need of systematic and organized psychosocial support.

Taking the lead from this finding, Caritas India approached NIMHANS, one of the premier organisation in counselling and psychosocial support to train her humanitarian staff on different dimensions of care giving.

13 program staff from Caritas India and partner organisations undergone a week-long training on psychosocial care in disaster management conducted by National Institute of Mental Health and Nero Sciences (NIMHANS) at Bangalore from May 23-28, 2016.

Participants were given complete understanding of psychosocial issues during disasters and taught techniques to provide psychosocial care to the survivors in the stressful situation. Through risk mapping, the vulnerabilities of different sections of the society was discussed upon.

The training hold significance as these humanitarian workers will train other member of their organizations in their respective zones to become a care giver.

Catherine Kune, Program officer, Caritas India and newly trained care given shared that her role as care giver got strengthened after receiving the psychosocial support training. Psychosocial care is one of the invisible need which nurture the survivor to get back to their normal life. She is confident to introduce these skills in the Caritas India Assisted Voluntary Reintegration project which she handles to reintegrate returnees to their normal life.

Mr. Anjan Bag, Manager Disaster Risk Reduction, Caritas India shared that though the structural recovery affected communities get back to the normalcy, however psychosocial healings make recovery faster and easy.

He said that Caritas India intends to make her recovery program more holistic by having set psychosocial experts in the recovery team.

Executive Director Fr. Frederick D’souza assertively shared that psychosocial support will be the integral part of upcoming Disaster Risk Reduction policy of Caritas India.