Killing me softly: The effects of emergency work on the health status of paramedics

Carried out by a research team from Quebec, Canada, this paper outlines the findings from a literature review of publications regarding the impact of emergency work on pre-hospital practitioners' health.

During a literature search on MEDLINE (Ovid, Pubmed, National Library of Medicine), 48 relevant articles published between 2000 and 2011 were identified. The authors applied specific inclusion and exclusion criteria to the retrieved papers and, ultimately, 25 studies were examined within this literature review.

The review draws upon research into emergency services across the globe, including Australia, Scandinavia, the US, UK, Germany, Hungary and Japan among others. Numbers of participants in the individual studies vary from 9 to 5567. Usefully, the titles and a synopsis of each of the 25 articles are presented.

In truth, all the papers would be worthy of reading in their own right. However the literature review removes this burden from time-pressed paramedics and synthesises the research.

The authors highlight two broad areas that can produce stressors in paramedic work. First, organisational issues such as the everyday stress of workload; pressure to achieve response times; rotating shift patterns; variable waiting times between calls.