Paramedics and the chance of a better outcome: Psychological health and safety and employer liability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian paramedics experience high rates of work-related PTSD and suicide. Relevant scholarship has claimed that paramedics often experience more stress from a lack of support within the workplace than from the traumatic nature of their work. The purpose of this study was to determine what underlying legislation might support the implementation of comprehensive support programs for Canadian paramedics. In-depth interviews were conducted with paramedics and key actors from paramedic services in Saskatoon, Canada and Queensland, Australia; a workplace with an emerging response to paramedic mental health and one with an established, multi-modal, comprehensive health promotion program, respectively. The Saskatoon sample provided narratives demonstrating a lack of support in the workplace as the primary cause of stress while the Brisbane sample presented as satisfied with their support services and unconcerned with PTSD and suicide. The major difference between the two cases was the employers’ level of assertiveness in promoting social support within the workplace, owing to underlying occupational health and safety law. Australia’s primary duty of care model supports a culture where the employer is primarily responsible for the prevention of work-related injuries. In Canada, occupational health and safety law does not hold any actor primarily responsible for injury prevention, yet psychological health and safety in the workplace is an emerging liability issue for employers. This thesis explains Canada’s first responders’ mental health crisis as a sociopolitical problem rather than a collection of individual tragedies. Much can be learned from Queensland case study where the employer was mandated to actively promote psychological health and safety within the workplace rather than ad hoc PTSD and suicide intervention programs. Finally, the struggle to respond to high call volumes was among the top psychological health concerns for all participants, demonstrating that resourcing levels need to be addressed in order to fully promote better health outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".