Ambulance workers and firefighters make up two of the most admirable professions that serve the daily and spontaneous needs of the public. In addition to the inherent dangers of their jobs, however, there are also related crime risks that often go overlooked and underreported in discussions about their service to the community, reports phillyvoice.com.
In a new study led by Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, researchers attempted to quantify and evaluate the dangers paramedics and firefighters face on a regular basis. After reviewing statistics gathered by the FEMA-funded Firefighter Injury Research and Safety Trends (FIRST) project and conducting a series of interviews with paramedics injured by their patients while on duty, the Drexel team determined that paramedics are 14 times more likely to be victims of a violent attack than their firefighting peers.
首席研究员詹妮弗·泰勒（Jennifer Taylor）是公共卫生学院的副教授，他开始研究她的研究，研究了对男性和女性消防员的暴力袭击率是否存在性别差异。尽管她发现女性消防员遭受殴打的可能性是她研究小组中的男性同行的六倍，但她最终得出结论，职业而不是性别可能是更好的风险指标。
“As an epidemiologist, I started describing the risk factors that public health researchers usually use: age, race, sex, etc. But we had some members of the responder community tell us to look at the paramedics because women are more likely to be paramedics than firefighters,” Taylor said. “This is why stakeholder engagement is so important in all phases of scientific research. By having a group of advisers who could look at preliminary data, they prevented me from making an incomplete conclusion.”
因为女性群体的研究were 15 times more likely to be paramedics than firefighters, a comparison across the two professions suggested that the gender gap in violence was statistically insignificant.
In her one-on-one interviews with paramedics, Taylor found several common threads that help explain the source of violent encounters. Multiple paramedics said they had troubled relationships with dispatchers, who often neglect to warn them about the scenes they’re entering and are untimely about sending backup once a situation is deemed unsafe. Others said that felt they had inadequate training to handle combative patients.
The department in question typically fields more than 700 calls per day, often when the ambulance request isn’t even for true medical emergencies. The cumulative stress of that response rate, which requires the same mentality for each call, can contribute to poor work environments that produce high burnout levels.
“You go back the next day and [you’re] expected to be the same person. You’re not,” one paramedic in the study said. “Every time someone does something to you, you’re different than you were the day before.”
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