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Pre-hospital psychosocial care: changing attitudes

09 September 2012
Features
02 September 2012
Volume 4 · Issue 9

Abstract

Holistic care is often a term widely associated with mental health professions, self help and alternative therapies, and often wrongly deemed irrelevant by those working in the pre-hospital care arena. The paradigm of an individual being much more than just the skin and bone holding itself together has gained increasing emphasis over recent decades in medicine, nursing, and now paramedicine. This article reviews the current literature and focuses on the concept of paramedics exploring not just the traditional physical needs of their patients but also the psychological and sociological. It further explores the drive to change attitudes held by pre-hospital practitioners that holistic care as irrelevant and meaningless. By distancing ourselves as a profession from the outdated perception of paramedicine as merely an emergency transportation service, we can change attitudes and thus expand the constraints of biomedical models of emergency and unscheduled health and appreciate the importance of biopsychosocial care for both patients and practitioners.

The term paramedic often evokes visions of the dramatic, fast–paced and even heroic misconceptions perpetuated, disseminated and sometimes engineered by modern media coverage, and which were, up until only recently, mirrored in paramedic training. In the UK, Australia, the US, Africa and all across the world this largely under-represented and misunderstood profession is undergoing a dramatic change in professional identity, responsibility and education.

Rogers and Reynolds (2003) portray such change as the very fabric of social care, while being an unpredictable, disruptive yet continual process of which the notion alone causes alarm. An inevitable aspect of both personal and professional life, change can have multiple impetuses, affect many people, encounter much resistance and is increasingly commonplace in the emergency and unscheduled care arena. Pinnock and Dimmock (2003) argue that without realistic definitions of objectives and outcomes, success cannot be measured and failure can often be rewarded. They further suggest that a service that is clear about its purpose is more likely to be effective than a service that is not, supporting Reynolds’ (2003) argument that an organisation’s primary task can be used as a benchmark to any proposed change. This is a rather disconcerting hypothesis for paramedicine, at a time of mixed attitudes towards the relevance of sociology, psychology, holistic care and conflicting ideologies of its true professional purpose. There has been a recent shift in focus in healthcare management from maintaining the status quo to deliberately stimulating change and encouraging innovation in order to make continual improvements (Martin and Henderson, 2001). With healthcare practitioners (HCP) now being expected to care for their service users (SU) holistically, by taking account of their physical, social and psychological care needs, any stagnant attitudes within this profession need to be challenged and changed, in order to deliver effective biopsychosocial care.

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Attitudes
Biopsychosocial
Psychology
Social determinants of health
Sociology