Staff Welfare in EMS

In my previous post, I included a link to a youtube video of a lecture given by Dr. Brian Maguire. Dr. Maguire is a professor in the EMS department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore county, and recently received a Fulbright scholarship to study safety in EMS in Australia.

In the series of videos that comprises this half hour lecture, Dr. Maguire discusses the importance of creating a healthy workforce. The word healthy in this context is a holistic type of healthy- not just eating right and hitting the gym three times a week. While a healthy body is certainly a part of being a healthy person, having a healthy mind and spirit are equally as important. This is a relatively easy concept for the individual, but translating this concept to an entire workforce is more difficult.

Certainly it makes sense that a healthy and happy employee will be a good, positive employee. But how does an EMS organization help to generate and maintain happy and healthy employees? Encourage employee physical health, provide resources to employees to help with stress management, encourage a generally healthy lifestyle. Get together with local gyms and nutritionists and find discounts for employees, figure out of benefits providers (e.g. health insurance) will provide discounts for weight loss, smoking cessation programs, or other health improvements. And let the employees know about it.

But one healthy employee does not a healthy workforce make. Nor does an entire body of healthy employees make a healthy workforce-- while the workforce is made up of individual people, the group as a whole has its own dynamics. Workforces as a whole have many of their own ailments preventing good health. Supervisors who aren't helping their employees do their jobs to the best of their ability, but supervisors who are chewing out their employees for small oversights that have little or no effect on patient outcomes. Poor leadership and poor management, a lack of recognition of good work- whether it's a part of their day to day job or not. EMS, in my experience, has generally failed in this regard.

In my experience, paramedics don't come to work intending to screw up, or intending to be forgetful, or intending to make their supervisors' lives busier or more complicated, or rife with paperwork. They come to work to do a good job- to take care of people, show compassion, and do good medicine. In the process mistakes are made. Good supervisors look to these mistakes as learning experiences, not time to verbally berate field employees. The best supervisors find ways to make the learning experiences so memorable that those particular mistakes won't happen again.

So, how then does an organization create a healthy workforce? Make sure the world is in balance. While EMS organizations say that they often put patients first, at what cost does that come to the organization? The goal of an EMS organization is to provide excellent patient care. But sometimes, field level employees need to come in at least in second.