Psychology of Emergencies: A new Profession for a Current Social Need

Abstract

The current social needs in situations of crises, emergencies, and catastrophes have led to the work of emergency psychology professionals becoming an essential response service for citizens. This makes it necessary to work on the design of specialized training for emergency psychologists by government entities and scientific and professional associations, so as to guarantee a minimum and essential level of training for these professionals to provide quality intervention and care in the field of psychology. Due to the specific idiosyncrasies of the discipline at this time, in this paper we develop an approach to a training model based on competencies, which we consider an appropriate option to follow in order to achieve the necessary regulation in the specialization of this new profession.