Majority of Paramedics Face Abuse

In a study, more than half of EMS respondents said they had faced abuse following 911 calls in the last year.

In a new study, over two-thirds of paramedics in Ontario and Nova Scotia reported facing verbal, physical or sexual abuse in the workplace. Over 1,300 Emergency Medical Service workers in the two provinces were polled at an educational seminar where they were asked whether they had experienced violence on the job in the last year. Roughly 67 per cent reported verbal abuse, which they largely attributed to patients and patients’ families. 40 per cent said they experienced acts of intimidation (of which they attributed nearly half to their own colleagues) while over a quarter of respondents reported physical abuse, 13 per cent reported sexual harassment, and nearly 3 per cent reported sexual assault. All of this was within a twelve month period, in a group that was 70 per cent male with a median age of 34.