Psychological first aid (PFA) has become the flagship early intervention for disaster survivors, with recent adaptations for disaster responders, in the post-9/11 era. PFA is broadly endorsed by expert consensus and integrated into guidelines for mental health and psychosocial support in disasters and extreme events. PFA frameworks are proliferating, with increasing numbers of models developed for delivery by a range of providers for use with an expanding array of target populations. Despite popularity and promotion there remains a dearth of evidence for effectiveness and recent independent reviews of PFA have highlighted this important gap. This commentary juxtaposes the current propagation of PFA against the compelling need to produce evidence for effectiveness and suggests a series of actions to prioritize and expedite real-time, real-event field evaluation of PFA.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 75. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 October 2025.
All research outputs
#717,089
of 34,365,356 outputs
Outputs from Diaster Health
#2
of 31 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#4,588
of 243,042 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Diaster Health
#1
of 1 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,365,356 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 97th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 31 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 25.1. This one scored the same or higher as 29 of them.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 243,042 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 1 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than all of them
