EMS Workers: Coping With Stress

Paramedics and ambulance dispatchers often get the short end of the stick–the rise of cop shows has increased awareness of PTSD among law enforcement officials, but it’s taken much longer for this to trickle down to their colleagues in the Emergency Medical Services. The problem extends even as far as the training and hiring processes themselves. Police officers are screened during the hiring process to make sure that the prospective officers will cope well with stress and succeed in their job, but there is no such screening process for EMS workers.

I asked Ontario emergency medical dispatcher Robin Gillies how Toronto EMS should screen applicants for job suitability: “That’s a tough question. A lot of times you don’t know until you’re well into it. I do think that people need to be given more of an opportunity to sit in at a call centre. There have been a couple of people over the years that have been hired that have gone after it for the money and realized that they can’t do it.”

As the son of a paramedic and an ambulance dispatcher, I know first-hand that these jobs can affect people. Gillies echoes this sentiment. “Maybe within the first years it’s a little different, but any one of us that has done this for ten years or more… If anyone tries to tell you that they have no problems… that’s the first problem.” I asked her what causes this change: “It’s the volume of doing this for years. It’s a bunch of different things.”

If you don’t become detached, you’re going to lose yourself.

Gillies believes that it’s important for EMS workers to separate their home lives from their work lives if they wish to be successful in the long term: “Detachment is part of that cynicism, that coldness that other people tend to feel or see. You have to become detached. If you don’t become detached, you’re going to lose yourself. It gets to a point where it’s your survival mechanism.” She also notes that a key factor in job success among EMS workers is having immersive and fulfilling hobbies to occupy their minds during their off-time: “How do you lose yourself in something else in order to keep you whole enough to be able to go back and do the job? There are people who go through the motions, and there are people who do the job effectively. And with every one of them, there’s a detachment. There has to be.”

My dad has always told me that paramedicine is a young person’s game. Gillies agrees, almost verbatim: “It’s very difficult to retire from this job and still be unbroken. With paramedics, they’re all broken [physically] after a while–shoulders, back, neck, knees, hips… Glen [her husband, an Ontario paramedic] has got constant back pain, his knees bother him… It’s a young person’s game.”

It’s very difficult to retire from this job and still be unbroken.

Many EMS workers opt to move into management and other less strenuous senior positions later on in their careers, but options are limited–especially for dispatchers. Gillies explains, “The only way to get longevity on the road is to find an alternate way. Glen does response, and he does supervising. That adds longevity to his career. In dispatch, our options are a lot more limited, which is problematic. There are some things that having a little more experience is helping with, but as far as dispatching is concerned… it’s not for someone in their sixties to be doing anymore. A lot of people become senior dispatchers. Some get into supervising, but those options are limited. Those who can’t do teach, right? Some of them become training officers to they can impart their knowledge when they don’t have the speed. There are a couple of things we can do, but nowhere near as much as there should be.”

But many EMS workers, including Gillies, have been pushing for reform: “There needs to be a better look at that, and that’s something I’ve personally been pushing management for a while, because there’s nowhere for an EMD [emergency medical dispatcher] to go if they get to a point where they can’t physically do that job. It’s a young person’s job too.”