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Occupational injuries among emergency medical personnel: An international epidemic
Emergency medical services (EMS) personnel respond to 31 million calls per year in the United States alone. In addition to their vital role in providing day-to-day emergency medical care, they also provide critical services during public events and disasters, and they are increasingly involved with community heath and injury prevention. The objective of this presentation is to describe the literature on occupational risks among EMS personnel.
Methods
Medline search using terms: ambulance personnel, paramedics, occupational injury, lifting injury, assault and transportation.
Results
Maguire examined fatal injuries among ambulance personnel and found a rate of 12.7 injuries per 100,000 workers per year; a rate comparable to police and firefighters, and more than twice the U.S. national average. The non-fatal injury rate is 35 cases per 100 full-time workers per year. Among Australian paramedics, the risk of serious injury is more than seven times higher than the national average and the fatality rate is five times higher than the national average. Violence against paramedics has been described as a significant problem in three countries.
Conclusions
The high rate of injury and fatality among paramedics is serious public health emergency. In addition to the devastating individual consequences, the problem likely results in poorer care, longer response times and higher costs for the millions of people who call for EMS personnel every year.
Ambulance agencies must work with researchers to conduct analyses of data and interviews with injured personnel. These steps are required before interventions can be developed, tested and implemented.
Learning Areas:
EpidemiologyOccupational health and safety
Learning Objectives:
Describe the main causes of occupational injury and fatality among emergency medical services personnel
Design a system to capture risks within an organization
Assess risks within an organization
Compare risks between groups within an organization (e.g. by gender) and between organizations
Keyword(s): Emergency Medical Services, Occupational Health and Safety
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am a professor at the Central Queensland University in Australia and a 2009 Senior Fulbright Scholar. I have a doctoral degree in public health from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and over thirty publications in the areas of epidemiology, policy, management and disaster preparedness; those publications have been cited 478 times. I worked for 20 years in the New York City health care system as an administrator, researcher, educator and paramedic.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.