The Impact of Experience, Exposure and Support on Emergency Worker Health
Abstract
When lives are at stake, EMTs are often called upon to rescue victims from danger. However, EMTs may be silent victims of the endless stressful crises that they encounter. Current research has shown that following major disasters, emergency workers may develop psychological and somatic symptoms that adversely affecttheir well-being. However, there have been methodological limitations that leave unanswered questions . The current study examined how exposure to everyday rescue situations , experience , and social support had an impact on blood pressure, heart rate, proofreading task performance, and symptom reporting in EMTs.Participants were studied for 8 weeks and reported on their rescue experiences. The results indicated that it is not necessarily the number of rescues, but the nature of the rescues that make the greatest impact. Situations involving death were significantly correlated with many of the dependent measures, but some were not in the expected direction. The findings suggested that increased exposure to death was associated with more adverse psychological and physiological symptoms. Experience accounted for significant variance in BP scores with greater experience being associated with higher BP. Support accounted for significantvariance in BP and MMPI scores. Greater perceived support was associated with lower SP and MMPI scores. Post hoc analyses of the emotion-focused variables on the Ways of Coping Scale yielded significant findings for all of the dependent measures except for proofreading performance, BP and HR. These results suggested that emotion-focused coping was detrimental to the EMTs well-being. Overall, the results did not support the hypotheses for experience and exposure. However, significant findings emerged for these variables that warrant further investigation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 26, 1996
- Accession Number
- AD1011506
Entities
People
- Lolita Burrell
Organizations
- Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences