When there is a major disaster, sending for a masseur may not be the first thing that springs to mind. However, according to emergency workers, a spot of expertly applied TLC in the middle of a gruelling shift can work wonders.

Kim Wooldridge is the managing director of the only emergency response massage team in the UK. The idea came to her after a visit to New York in 2001 where she and a colleague, Lynne Woods, joined a massage team from North Carolina who were working at sites across the city, including Ground Zero.

Soon after the September 11 attacks Ms Wooldridge, a massage therapist and aromatherapist, received an e-mail via an online aromatherapist group asking whether she could supply aromatherapy oils to New York's emergency workers. “Instead of sending the oils, I wondered if I could go and help out instead,” she says.

She made inquiries and was put in touch with the North Carolina team. She worked alongside American volunteers offering short massages to the city's emergency workers. “It was a very powerful experience,” she said. “We worked with firefighters mainly, but also police and social workers. Everybody was asking us ‘ Do you have teams like this in the UK?'. So, when I got back I started making inquiries and nobody had heard of such a thing.”

Since then, Ms Wooldridge has built up the 40-strong Response Emergency Stress Team (Rest) UK, founded in September 2002. The team consists of trained volunteers, all certified massage therapists. Seven of the team worked at the scene of a major fire at Atherstone on Stour, Warwickshire, a year ago, in which four firefighters died. More than 200 firefighters attended the scene, and when the volunteers arrived, emergency workers had been on the site for three days trying to reclaim the bodies of their colleagues.

Simon Forster, a firefighter from Hampshire who was drafted in, says that the massage proved beneficial. “People who haven't experienced it may see it as a bit of a luxury, but it enables you to carry on, to feel like you can go back and do the work again,” he said. “We were doing 12-hour shifts at the site and it was fairly arduous work. [But after a massage] you stand up and you feel rejuvenated. You walk out of there and you feel like a new person.”

Ms Wooldridge said: “Emergency workers are pretty much taken for granted. As well as helping them physically, the massage helps them spiritually, mentally and emotionally. It's a way of making them feel valued and cared for.”

Atherstone is the first live incident that Rest has attended. “This is the sticking point,” Ms Wooldridge said. “Because we are so small, no one knows about us.” The message, she says, has got through to firefighters, but has been slower to spread among other emergency services. Rest was not deployed to the London bombings in July 2005, for instance. “I was making phone calls to everyone I knew, but I just couldn't get through to the right people,” she said.

Volunteers with Rest work on fire service training exercises and were allowed to attend the Atherstone site, Ms Wooldridge adds, because she saw the team leader for Hampshire fire service interviewed about the fire on television. “I recognised him, so I rang his mobile,” she said.

In New York, emergency workers would often talk to Ms Wooldridge during a massage, telling her of what they had seen. “At the end of the massage they would perhaps recognise that they had opened up and that they needed help,” she says. “We're not counsellors, we don't ask them how they feel, but we give them a massage and that's long enough for them to feel cared for. For some people, it brings about an awareness of their feelings. It's almost as if we help to begin a healing process.”

The lowdown

Who
Kim Wooldridge is the managing director of Rest UK and has been a massage therapist and aromatherapist for ten years.

What
Rest is a charity that aims to provide stress relief for emergency services workers. Volunteers give workers an on-site 10 to 15-minute chair massage, through clothing, concentrating on the upper and lower back, neck, head, shoulders, arms and hands.

When
The charity was set up in September 2002. This September, Rest UK linked up with the Emergency Services Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University. Rest’s work will feed into research that the unit is doing on trauma experienced by firefighters.

Why
Emergency response massage teams took off in the US after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. However, before the establishment of Rest UK no one was delivering similar services to emergency responders in Britain.

www.restuk.org.uk

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