Outcomes of Trauma-Focused Psychological Therapies for Police Officers with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Abstract

Trauma-focused therapies hold promise for reducing the symptoms of PTSD in police officers, but there remains a lack of certainty about the magnitude of improvement with these approaches. We aimed to determine the extent to which trauma-focused psychological therapies are effective for police officers. A random effects meta-analysis was conducted to provide a weighted estimate of the effect size of trauma-focused therapy in studies of police officers. Searches were conducted in PsycINFO, PTSDpubs, Medline and Embase databases. The screening of 1919 papers yielded four studies with 804 participants in total. The overall within subjects (pre-post) effect size was large (Hedges' g = 1.81), suggesting that trauma-focused psychotherapy may reduce PTSD symptoms for police officers; however, the small pool of included studies necessitates caution and requires confirmation from additional studies. There remains a lack of rigorous controlled studies, potential for improved reporting practices and limited diversity and generalisability in the literature. Show more