| As an important group of health care professionals, paramedics apply first aid, care for sick or injured individuals and assist doctors in emergency situations. Beside routine tasks like driving ambulances and documenting operations, paramedics are frequently confronted with difficult and risky situations, such as severe accidents or life-threatening acute diseases, which require rapid decision-making and action under complex conditions (Regehr, LeBlanc, Jelley, & Barath, 2008). Beside shiftwork and rapid switching between periods of rest and activity, unclear emergency calls can be seen as further stressors. Therefore, in addition to being well-trained, paramedics should exhibit definite abilities to deal with stress, in order to treat patients optimal and ensure their own health and wellbeing (Gayton & Lovell, 2012). The present study aimed to investigate self-reported stress burden and psychophysiological reactivity in paramedics and a control group drawn from other professional fields, in addition to self-reported health status, coping strategies and personality traits. Although emergency service provision must undoubtedly be regarded as highly demanding work, it is not certain that paramedics experience greater work-related stress than other professional groups or the general population (Gayton & Lovell, 2012). Interestingly, some studies even reported lower stress burden, as well as better mental and physical health, in first responders compared to other professional groups (e.g., Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). In this regard, paramedics reported, for example, mainly focusing on the cognitive and technical aspects of their tasks instead of human tragedies, indicating efficient handling of these challenges (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010; Regehr, Goldberg, & Hughes, 2002). To date, few studies have investigated personality traits in paramedics and their relevance to workrelated stress; paramedics scored lower on the personality dimensions of neuroticism, openness and agreeableness, and higher on conscientiousness, with respect to samples drawn from the general population, possibly indicating that paramedics benefit from a calm, thoughtful and thorough manner (e.g., Mirhaghi, Mirhaghi, Oshio, & Sarabian, 2016). In addition, sensation seeking has been identified as a common trait among paramedics (Chng & Eaddy, 1999; Klee & Renner, 2013). Sensation seeking refers to the tendency to place oneself in risky situations and seek out extreme experiences, intense feelings and states of high arousal (Zuckerman, 2010). The association between emergency service-based work and exposure to intense and arousing situations may motivate high sensation seeking individuals to choose this profession (Mirhaghi et al., 2016). |
