Most Significant Publications
The role of an organizational ombud (formerly ombudsman) is increasingly recognized as a significant contributor to fostering a healthy workplace environment. This specialized service offers an impartial, confidential, informal, and independent resource for employees and executives, addressing their concerns, mediating conflicts, and promoting fair treatment within the organization. While the role of an ombud may vary from one organization to another, this article sheds light on the findings of our ombud’s office and its contribution to the health of an organization. The ombud consultation evaluation survey serves as a valuable tool for organizations to simultaneously safeguard the health of their employees and the health of their business. The ombud confidential services serve as a cornerstone of organizational health, contributing to enhanced employee satisfaction, improved conflict resolution, ethical compliance, increased productivity, and reduced legal risks.
*Peer-reviewed
Katy Kamkar and Mario Baril (2024)
Wellness and resilience have been at the epicenter of attention amongst many law enforcement researchers, clinicians, and professionals in recent years. Both resilience and wellness aim to provide law enforcement officers with knowledge and effective tools that can be employed during both professional and personal challenges. The current manuscript presents wellness within a context of prevalent conditions and/or situations (i.e., what is called “Good” during the “Bad” and “Ugly”) that law enforcement officers experience as part of their duties as well as in their personal lives. The authors aim to raise awareness of police wellness that needs to be viewed within the context of police work and not in a vacuum. Considering that, tangible actions and recommendations are also discussed.
*Peer-reviewed
Konstantinos Papazoglou, Katy Kamkar, and Jeff Thompson
(2021)
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced unprecedented challenges for police services, amplifying occupational stressors and health risks among frontline officers. This paper explores the unique impacts of COVID-19 on Canadian police forces, emphasizing heightened risks, including exposure to the virus during duty, potential transmission to families, and the strain of operational adjustments. It discusses the escalating mental health concerns, such as operational stress injuries (OSI), and outlines strategies for self-care and resilience among police officers. Despite the challenges, community support and organizational initiatives play crucial roles in sustaining morale and mental well-being amidst the pandemic.
*Peer-reviewed
Shahin Mehdizadeh, Katy Kamkar (2020)
It has been a sincere honour and true pleasure to be on the program committee, as well as session convener, for the International Law Enforcement and Public Health (LEPH) conference held in October 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland. During the recent conference, I was fortunate to work with eight esteemed colleagues from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, sharing international perspectives on Police Mental Health and Well-Being. Police Organizations everywhere, it seems, are increasingly working on reducing stigma and addressing common mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder as part of mental health education, prevention, early identification, and intervention. To this date, workplace interventions continue to be primarily reactive rather than preventive. One of the many pathways to build and optimize prevention involves interventions at both individual and organizational levels—creating a healthy positive organi-zational culture and improving workplace mental health promotion by reducing workplace risk factors and identifying and building individual as well organizational strengths and protective factors. Together with these colleagues, all of whom contrib-uted to the preparation and delivery of our panel session in Edinburgh, we are pleased to share some highlights from the important dialogue that resulted. The following segments each provide guidance on building awareness of police men-tal health; both organizational and individual level factors; ways to reduce stigma (personal stigma, self-stigma, and workplace stigma); optimizing interventions; and taking holistic approaches to care. I begin this paper, as I did during our session, by offering some of my own thoughts about a proactive approach to health at organizational and individual levels, as well as a discussion on psychological health and safety implementation strategies to help reduce risk factors and promote individual and organizational resiliency. My co-authors then each share their own perspectives.
*Peer-reviewed
Katy Kamkar, Grant Edwards, Ian Hesketh, Dale McFee, Konstantinos Papazoglou, Paul Pedersen, Katrina Sanders,Tom Stamatakis, Jeff Thompson (2020)
Presenting the issue Clinical depression, anxiety disorders, trauma, and stressor-related disor- ders, in particular, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), together with substance use disorders are among the many mental health conditions increasingly being identified and addressed as part of workplace mental health prevention and interventions. Depression is the third highest cause of the burden of disease and is predicted to be the leading cause of disease burden in 2030 (World Health Organisation, 2008). Prevention and early interventions are essential given negative outcomes resulting from common mental health conditions left untreated and for a prolonged period of time (World Health Organisation, 2001). One of the many pathways to build and optimise prevention involves interventions at both individual and organisational levels—creating a healthy positive organisational culture and improving workplace mental health promotion by reducing workplace risk factors and identifying and building individual as well organisational strengths and protective factors. Occupational stressors can increase the risk of mental health conditions, both at clinical and sub-clinical levels, including depression, anxiety disorders, burnout, and psychological distress (such as Memish, Martin, Bartlett, Dawkins, & Sanderson, 2017; Harvey et al., 2017; Joyce et al., 2016) both at individual Mitigating risk factors and building protective factors as prevention strategies ❘ 127 and organisational levels (for example, Memish, Martin, Bartlett, Dawkins, & Sanderson, 2017; Martin, Karanika-Murray, Biron, & Sanderson, 2014). Analogously, both potential traumatic events and occupational stressors (organisational stressors and operational stressors) have been found to be associated with mental health conditions and with occupational stressors being significant contributors after controlling for traumatic exposure (see Carleton et al., 2020).
Katy Kamkar, Konstantinos Papazoglou (2020)
Exposure to critical incidents and hence potentially traumatic events is endemic in law enforcement. The study of law enforcement officers’ experience of moral injury and their exposure to potentially morally injurious incidents, and research on moral injury’s relationship with different forms of traumatization (e.g. compassion fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder) are in their infancy. The present study aims to build on prior research and explores the role of moral injury in predicting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its clusters thereof. To this end, a sample of law enforcement officers (N = 370) from the National Police of Finland was recruited to participate in the current study. Results showed that moral injury significantly predicted PTSD as well as its diagnostic clusters (i.e., avoidance, hyperarousal, re-experiencing). The aforementioned role of moral injury to significantly predict PTSD and its clusters were unequivocal even when compassion fatigue was incorporated into the path model. Clinical, research, and law enforcement practice implications are discussed.
*Peer-reviewed
Victoria Briones Chiongbian
Moral distress is a condition affecting police officers who, because of insurmountable circumstances (e.g., not being able to protect a civilian from a violent criminal) or bad judgement (e.g., crossfire between officers), believe that they did not do enough or did not do the “right thing.” Moral injury occurs when police officers perpetrate, fail to prevent, or bear witness to deaths or severe acts of violence that transgress deeply held moral beliefs (e.g., fatally shooting an allegedly armed criminal who is later proved to be unarmed). Considering the multidimensional nature of police work, several authors have maintained that it is imperative to understand the complex nature of police moral suffering (i.e., moral distress and moral injury). This review highlights the importance of assessing and recognizing moral injuries and/or distress among police officers. The data indicates that counsellors should build relevant, empirically validated interventions into their counselling treatment plans. Moreover, researchers have suggested that counsellors employ practice-based and evidence-based techniques with officers who experience moral suffering. Ultimately, recommendations for future research are provided, considering that research in this area is in its infancy.
*Peer-reviewed
Konstantinos Papazoglou, Daniel M. Blumberg, Katy Kamkar, Alexandra McIntyre-Smith, Mari Koskelainen (2020)
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating psychological health condition that jeopardizes the wellbeing, holistic health and functioning of police officers following exposure to traumatic, stressful, and life- threatening experiences. While resiliency is expected of officers, the recurrent encounter to traumatic incidents eventually influences the expression of symptoms that collectively constitutes PTSD. In addition to exploring the definition of PTSD and how it affects officers, this paper intends to inform police officers suffering from PTSD of the availability of effective treatments (e.g., prolonged exposure therapy, cognitive processing therapy) and to explain major parts of PTSD treatment to ensure officers are able to understand the processes involved in the treatment. This article hopes to clear up any skepticism about the efficacy of PTSD treatment and help officers become more informed about PTSD treatment.
*Peer-reviewed
Konstantinos Papazoglou, Katy Kamkar, Prashant Aukhojee (2019)
The idea of moral injury has been pervasive in human societies for thousands of years, and perhaps since the existence of humankind. In the Greco-Roman tradition, warrior nar- ratives reference the experience of moral conflicts on the battlefield (called miasma or “mίasma” e moral pollution and purification), defining it as a situation wherein someone with legitimate and recognized authority betrays what is right in a critical situation (Shay, 2014). In the modern era, conceptualization of moral injury is derived from research and clinical work with United States military personnel and veterans. It became apparent through both research and clinical practice that veterans who served in combat zones were exposed to traumas that altered their moral beliefs and values systems; that is, some veterans experienced a violation of their morals or beliefs during their service and became skeptical about whether or not the world is a just, benevolent, and safe place. Thereby, a formal definition refers to moral injury as exposure to unprecedented traumatic life events wherein one perpetrates, fails to prevent, or witnesses actions that “transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” (Litz et al., 2009, p. 1). Similarly, the US Marine Corps uses the term “inner conflict” when referring to experiences involving moral injury (Nash & Litz, 2013). Inner conflict may occur not only when a Marine experiences extraordinary violence (e.g., terrorists use children as “shields”) but also in moments when they are ordered to leave a wounded comrade behind in order to save their own lives.
Katy Kamkar, Chuck Russo, Brian Chopko, Brooke McQueery Tuttle (2019)
