EMS calls that touch a nerve is a well written article on dealing with difficult calls. What exactly is a difficult call differs tremendously from provider to provider. For some people it’s cancer, others burns, still others hate calls involving children. Well, just about everyone hates calls involving children.

Just as varied is how we deal with the stress. As Ms. Scadden writes, there are different ways to do that. Some of those are positive and productive, others are negative and self destructive. Going out with some co workers, having a few beers, and swapping lies works for some people and that’s fine as long as it doesn’t end up with the provider crawling into a bottle and pulling the cork in after him.

Other people take a more formal approach called Critical Incident Stress Management. This has become the subject of some controversy of late, with Dr. Bryan Bledsoe taking a lead role in deconstructing the fallacies of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. Others consider CISM and CISD to be the be all and end all of stress management. Some systems have taken to requiring mandatory attendance after “the bad one”. My experience with CISD is not a particularly positive one, which reflects my personal experience, not a general statement. The one time I went, I was more depressed than I was before I went. In this particular case, the people with the least involvement in the incident had the hardest time dealing with it. Maybe that’s part of the problem, being involved in something on the periphery and not actually being part of the treatment team might increase stress. That’s an interesting thought and maybe someone will do some research into it. Or, maybe those people just don’t belong in EMS because they are too emotional and lose the ability to function when a bad call happens. And mark my words, bad calls will happen.

I do laugh however, when self appointed experts start talking about “the rescuer personality” and how we have a “need to help others”. EMS providers are as individual as any other profession or job field. To try to characterize us in a few sound bites is a fool’s errand. Which makes it perfect for social workers, therapists, and psychologists.

If you find EMS stressful all the time or most of the time, you need to take steps to correct that. Counseling, hobbies that don’t involve EMS, CISD, whatever it takes as long as it’s positive and actually helps. Because it’s only help, if it helps.

Whatever you do, don’t go to this guy. Unless you believe in tough love.