The Culture of Mental Health in Fire and EMS

Mental health is an important topic for EMS organizations and Fire Departments everywhere. Statistics suggest that every organization has individuals on staff that have a diagnosed, or undiagnosed, mental health illness. Over the past seven years, I have served as the Fire Chief for Burnsville Fire Department. During my time as Chief, the department has seen multiple staff members seek treatment for mental health illnesses. Dealing with mental health in our own organization is our new reality and can actually make our organization stronger. I feel the hottest topic related to mental health is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is prevalent in our industry because as first responders, we see things that we unfortunately struggle to forget. I may be an outlier amongst my peers in how we view mental health, but I believe it is important to create a culture of support around mental health. The Impact of Patient Care Treating patients with mental health for EMS providers presents a lot of challenges. Mental health can present across a very large spectrum in EMS; some patients you will find are in acute crisis while others are diagnosed with issues of a chronic nature. Challenges also arise from finding suitable access to health care for mental health patients. There are many areas that do not have enough mental health resources, such as inpatient beds, so patients are either released from the emergency department shortly after we drop them off and we will encounter them a...
Source: JEMS Operations - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Resiliency Operations Source Type: news