Ontario EMS Agency Offers Program to Handle Workplace Stress

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, EMS providers experience post-traumatic stress disorder at a rate twice the normal population.

To help combat this phenomenon and alleviate some of this occupational stress, Superior North EMS in Thunder Bay, Ontario, partnered with Lakehead University professor Jo-Ann Vis to create a program to help deal with the difficult parts of the job.

The program, which ran in May 2015, was provided to all 200 paramedics in the Superior North EMS organization, which has 18 stations and responds to 25,000 calls per year, says Norm Gale, chief of EMS.

The program was made up of three different components.

The first portion was an educational component. This focused on letting the paramedics know about self-care practices and informing them on how minor, major and severe traumatic events can impact them physically and mentally.

The second portion was training on a peer support model. This gave the paramedics a guideline for how to discuss trauma with their partners using the Take N’ Five model, Vis says.

“The idea for this is to take five minutes with your riding partner or coworker to debrief each other on the occupational stressors they encountered on the previous call,” Vis says.  “They can plan on how they’re going to manage their stress through the rest of their shift, and plan on how they are going to take care of themselves when they’re off shift.”

The third portion of the program was an anti-stigma campaign. Vis says this looked at the policies and procedures that supervisors can follow to support the paramedics on staff. This can include counseling resources or other types of benefits for paramedics.

Gale says the focus on anti-stigma coincides with an attitude change in many departments.

“It wasn’t long ago that workplace stress was largely ignored, it was a stiff upper lip kind of thing,” Gale says. “Recently we have seen a change where veteran paramedics acknowledged that these injuries are as important as a broken leg or a back injury.”

Vis says the program is all part of a participatory action research model where they will be collecting information from the paramedics involved to see which of these components of the program worked best and were the most helpful in their everyday lives.

This research component involves a questionnaire that the paramedics filled out upon completion of the program, a focus group following the program and a follow up interview in the coming months. This will give the researchers a better look at whether or not the components of the program are making a difference.

Vis says this will offer better insight into what works for EMS personnel than past programs.

“In the past we’ve generally offered them the same types of services over and over again—critical incident stress debriefing, peer mentorship models—but there’s not really a lot of evidence to support that they make that much of a different or paramedics are happy to access them.”

Gale says the program and its findings will be important to the future of EMS.

“Simply put, operational stress injuries are not new,” Gale says. “What is new is the appreciation of the impact that they have. What we want to do is provide support to paramedics so they can have long careers and happy home lives. That’s not something we’ve done well for a long time. This research is something that will help us do that well.”

For more information on Superior North EMS, visit superiornorthems.com.