Posttraumatic Stress Disorders in Ambulance Paramedics Essay

Posttraumatic Stress Disorders in Ambulance Paramedics - Essay Example Critical incident stress debriefing is an intervention that is purposed to promote the effective processing of distressing events through normalization of reactions and preparation for anticipated future experiences (Feder, 2008). There is a treatment that is designed to take care of the emergency service personnel who could attend the critical incident session voluntarily or when instructed by a superior. The main aim of the review that was conducted was to identify literature that is related to interventions aimed at preventing and treating the disorder. Though emergency work is rewarding, the emergency personnel are more vulnerable to post-traumatic stress in long term and short term. This is because they are supposed to deal with potentially traumatizing circumstances. Some of the distressing situations include: mass incidents, major fires, burns patients, murder scenes, violent scenes, accident involving children, cot death and many others (Frieman, 2003). It is clear that emergency medical technicians are at higher risk of stress compared to other medical professionals and fire-fighters; they normally get involved in disasters and may be at high risk of severe stress disorder, which can lead to post-traumatic stress. ... Various research methods were used in this review and it is clear that, various databases were performed and research strategy made as wide as possible. These research methods included hand searching for journals, internet searching, keywords to search online database among others. The research that was done showed that the mass disasters are the major contributors of stress and that emergency workers are always the victims of this disorder (Feder, 2008). Medical study was carried to evaluate the risks of stress and to summarise the methodological limitations of the conducted research. The limitations found include: varying degree of trauma, small sample size and lack of uniformity, low response rate, sampling bias, non-prospective studies, no control group and timing variance. The researchers concluded that, it was not possible to fully determine the effectiveness of critical incident stress and it was cautious to conduct a proper evaluation. A recent review recommended that research should be on psychological debriefing of emergency attendance as a main concern for the study. According to Brewin (2005), methodological matters concern with determination of the level of psychological impairment after a disastrous incident. The methodological issues include: comparability issues and dimensions of disaster. The discussion of these issues was done, including the need to precisely define the study cases and population. Some researchers were concerned with the interpretation of questionnaire and the interview results; these can give different psychopathological estimates. Moreover, the type of data that was collected varies broadly and this leads to problems of generalisation of results. The aspect of