Mental health care in paramedic practice

If you are a frontline clinician within an ambulance service, you will be fully aware that mental health incidents are commonplace, complex, time consuming and, at times, frustrating for both patient and clinician. The traditional training that paramedics and technicians undergo will include mental health conditions; however, the proportion of incidents attended compared to the time afforded to this topic do not equate. I can confidently say that a Paramedic BSc programme will spend considerably more time covering trauma management and cardiac arrest than how to take a comprehensive mental health history, formulate a safe plan and accept a refusal from a patient that has self-harmed and will not go to hospital.

This message is put much more eloquently and backed with a catalogue of evidence in the introduction of Mental Health Care in Paramedic Practice by Ursula Rolfe and David Partlow. For example, in 2019, the London Ambulance Service (LAS) received 168 000 mental health-related calls (LAS, 2020). The authors present a very strong argument for why you should continue reading this book given the link between mental health and physical health. The lack of training you will likely have received while working towards your current clinical qualification, and the inevitability that you will be called to a mental health patient who is statistically more likely to die from their complaint than many of your other patients, should be enough for you to take mental health as seriously as every other medical and physical presentation.