First Responders

Stressed Out?

No longer feeling bullet-proof on the front-line of emergency services? You are not alone.

Increasingly first responder organisations are recognising front-line employees can burn out under the accumulated stress of their daily challenges.

The NSW Ambulance Service notes, for example, on its official website: “Ambulance staff and volunteers face the prospect of dealing with the traumatic effects of injury or death on a daily basis. While paramedics and operations centre staff are more likely to experience such situations, any employee may also be exposed to a trauma.”

Traumatic incidents for Ambulance staff may include:

• Major incidents or disasters.
• Multiple deaths on-scene.
• Prolonged or failed rescue.
• Massive trauma/multiple trauma incidents.
• Suicide or violent death.
• Assault or threat to an employee’s personal safety.
• Serious injury or death of a child, victims or relatives known by staff, an emergency services worker or an employee while at work. 

Solace

The research on the positive effect meditation and mindfulness can have on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD is now well established. But there are in reality challenges too when employees fear revealing their sense of work-related burn-out will cost them marking them as somehow weak or not up to the job.

Learning meditation and mindfulness can be done these days as cold online experience with one-size-fits-all applications. It is best learned and integrated into one’s life with an experienced and empathetic teacher face to face. And it can be done privately without necessarily letting work mates or organisational superiors in on your new course of self-help.