Responses to traumatic stress among community residents exposed to a train collision

Abstract

In 1996 in Stafford, UK, a collision occurred between a freight train and a post office train. While only one person died, 21 employees working on the post office train were injured. Instead of focusing on primary victims, i.e. those on the train, or secondary victims, i.e. helpers or the significant others of the dead and injured, the present paper focused on community residents who lived on both sides of the embankment where the collision occurred. There were two aims to this paper. We wished to (1) describe the degree of traumatic stress of the community residents and (2) describe their traumatic responses at the time and during the aftermath of the collision. The hypothesis was that there was a significant degree of traumatic stress among these residents and that the greater the impact of the collision they experienced, the more severe their traumatic stress became. Forty-nine residents participated in the study and were assessed using the Impact of Event Scale (IES), the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the Stafford train crash questionnaire. The results showed that among the whole sample, the residents experienced more intrusive thoughts than avoidance behaviour, but their scores were significantly lower than those of the standardized stress clinic samples. Forty-one per-cent of the residents scored at or above the cutoff point of the GHQ. Two groups, high symptom and low/medium symptom groups, were then divided, according to the cutoff of the IES, and compared. The results shows that the high symptom group scored significantly higher in the sub-scales of the IES, and the GHQ. There was indeed a tendency that the greater the impact of the collision residents experienced, the more severe the distress was. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.